WHAT HAPPENS WHEN COMMITTED SOCIALISTS TAKE CONTROL OF AN ENERGY-RICH NATION: Iran Says It Is Ready to Continue Fuel Shipments to Venezuela.
Iran is in bad shape, too: Iran hunts for grains as coronavirus compounds economic woes.
Archive for 2020
June 2, 2020
JUST BECAUSE IT’S OBVIOUS DOESN’T MEAN IT’S NOT WORTH STUDYING: Distancing and masks cut COVID-19 risk, says largest review of evidence.
INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST ORGANIZATION: Sky News Australia: “Of Course Antifa Is Behind The Violence!”
HEADLINE AT THE JERUSALEM POST: Iran, Russia, China, Turkey celebrate ‘collapse’ of US.
Authoritarian regimes throughout the world are pushing narratives that appear to gloat over and celebrate that chaos unfolding in the United States. On Monday, Iran’s media pushed stories that highlighted the “collapse,” while quoting Russian sources portraying that the US is flailing about as its world order comes crashing down.
I’m willing to give Andrew Cuomo the benefit of the doubt, but when Bill de Blasio says thing like this…
New York City mayor Bill de Blasio on Tuesday said that although mass protests had erupted in the city, religious institutions and small business owners would still be closed until Monday.
“When you see…an entire nation, simultaneously grappling with an extraordinary crisis seated in 400 years of American racism, I’m sorry, that is not the same question as the understandably aggrieved store owner or the devout religious person who wants to go back to services,” de Blasio told a reporter for the ultra-orthodox Jewish publication Hamodia.
“This is a powerful, painful historical moment. So no, I have eyes to see. We’re not going to treat it like it’s just any other day, we’re not going to treat it like, ‘Why are people outside [at] the bars,’ and not notice that all of America is grappling simultaneously with a horrible crisis,” the mayor continued. “Sorry guys, there’s a world outside New York City.”
…He’s definitely enjoying the Jerusalem Post’s headline.
LOOTERS STRIKE MACY’S AND MANHATTAN STORES BEFORE MONDAY’S CURFEW:
As the sun set Monday, the looting started once again across Manhattan as protests entered their fifth day in New York City. Police made several arrests, some inside Macy’s flagship store in Herald Square as looters struck.
Businesses on 5th and Madison avenues were spotted putting up plywood to prevent looting. However, that didn’t stop the looters from breaking in and grabbing what they wanted from the luxury stores.
Roving groups of people smashing their way into shops and emptying them of merchandise. The doors of Macy’s flagship Manhattan store were breached. Police pulled two handcuffed men out and put them in a van.
People rushed into a Nike store and carried out armloads of clothing. Near Rockefeller Center, storefront windows were smashed and multiple people arrested. Bank windows were smashed. Wreckage littered the inside of an AT&T store.
You might think the sneaker company would be upset about having its stores ransacked. But think again. You’re stealing Nikes? That just proves that Nike is the footwear brand of the revolution. That cool, edgy looter you see with his liberated Nikes is a walking advertisement, better than any money can buy. Others who admire the authenticity and passion and living purity of the looter — white suburban teens, for example, or progressive Ivy League lawyers — will now go out and buy Nikes so they can be part of the revolution, too.
Anyway, it’s not like the revolution is going to expropriate the sneaker factories — those have already been profitably relocated to countries under communist rule. Woke capitalism and the communism that employs the most brutal policing imaginable against the likes of Uighurs and Tibetans make perfect allies. Of course, corporate America wants you to know it totally rejects imperialism and racism. Just not the Chinese variety — or any other non-Western kind. As the Financial Times reports, amid this week’s riots, ‘Some companies devoted their advertising resources to responding to the crisis, with Nike — whose usual slogan is “Just Do It” — distributing a video telling Americans: “For once, Don’t Do It. Don’t pretend there’s not a problem in America.”’ Yes, Nike, there is a problem in America. Thank God we have corporations to watch out for our consciences.
As American journalist Heywood Broun once said, “Appeasers believe that if you keep throwing steaks to a tiger, the tiger will become a vegetarian.”
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Gaming leads to less exercise, poor eating among college men, study finds.
HMM: China unveils plan for Hainan free trade hub as US decoupling risk grows. “The tropical island will benefit from a low income tax rate, freedoms in trade, investment, capital flows and an easier investment environment.”
Well, until Beijing notices the locals getting uppity and takes all that away.
IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Treasury IG: 879K High-Income Earners Didn’t File Tax Returns.
AT AMAZON, ASICS Women’s Gel-Kayano 26 Running Shoes.
PJ MEDIA WEEK ON THE MARK GRIFFITH SHOW: Today it’s Tyler O’Neill, who will talk with Mark about Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center, his book on the Southern Poverty Law Center, and about the SPLC support for Antifa. The show starts at 3 PM Eastern Time, 1 PM Mountain Time, or noon Pacific Time.
Join them in Denver on the AM dial at 560 KLZ Radio, online at www.klzradio.com, or use the Tunein app on your phone. Call to at 303-477-5600.
Mark will be featuring PJM writers all week: Megan Fox tomorrow, Matt Margolis on Thursday, Jeff Reynolds on Friday.
CHINA IS ASSHOLE: Coronavirus ‘Key Information’ Withheld by China, Leak Shows. “Confirming what many had suspected, recordings leaked to the Associated Press show that Communist Chinese strongman Xi Jinping’s government ‘sat on releasing the genetic map, or genome,’ of the novel coronavirus ‘for over a week after multiple government labs had fully decoded it.’ As a result, health officials at WHO, in the U.S., and around the world were missing ‘details key to designing tests, drugs and vaccines’.”
HOW THE MEDIA CREATES NARRATIVES: Here is the Washington Post showing that blacks are shot to death by police more than Hispanics who are shot more than whites who are shot much more often than…. “other”. Other is about 43 million people, which would include about 21 million Asian Americans, who I’m guessing have an even lower rate of being shot to death by police than the full “other” category. But if you are trying to frame the narrative as an uncomplicated “cops shoot people of color more than whites” you can’t actually break out “Asians” because that undermines the narrative and means you have to dig a bit beyond the simple formula. So “Other” it is. It would also be helpful, though not to the “narrative,” to compare the percentage of individuals shot by race/ethnicity to arrest rates for violent crime.
YOU CAN’T CALL THEM LOOTERS WHEN THEY LOOT, BECAUSE TRUMP USES THAT WORD AND HE’S THE ENEMY. THAT’S HOW #JOURNALISM WORKS:
So just because they’re looting, you can’t call them “looters.” You say “some protesters broke into the store and stole whatever was on the shelves.”
Weird, you’d think it would be people opposed to the protests who’d want to blur the line between peaceful protesters and violent looters. But then, we’ll have the press defending church-burning before this is all over.
FIVETHIRTYEIGHT: De-escalation Keeps Protesters And Police Safer. Departments Respond With Force Anyway.
Missing context:
It’s difficult or impossible to deescalate when you have anarcho-fascists stirring up violence.
USAF’S FIFTH GENERATION ONE-TWO PUNCH ALOFT: An F-22 Raptor flies alongside an F-35 Lightning II over the Emerald Coast in northwest Florida. Photo taken May 18, 2020.