Archive for 2020
August 4, 2020
NEWS YOU CAN USE: New Gun Owner Guide: Finding Firearm Training.
REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: Media “Fact Checkers” Lean Left. Do tell.
MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: Media Silent As Christopher Steele ‘Hero’ ‘Spymaster’ Narrative Crumbles.
Steele did not personally collect any of the factual information in his reports. The “vast network” was instead a “social circle” of an American-based former Brookings Institute junior staffer, recently identified for the first time as Igor Danchenko. The friends didn’t have well-documented claims so much as rumors, drunken gossip, and outright brainstorming, conjecture, and speculation. Even that information was “multiple layers of hearsay upon hearsay” before it got to Steele, who then hyperbolically overstated it. And the damning claims of “collusion” appear to have been scandalously misattributed or invented out of whole cloth.
With such shoddy information collection and analysis methods, there was never any reason to give credence to any of the salacious allegations in the dossier, whether it was claims of secret deals with Russian oil concerns, secret meetings in foreign capitals, prostitutes urinating on Moscow hotel room beds, files of compromising information, or the careful cultivation of Trump, yes Trump, into the most effective Russian agent in history.
The media have a problem, then, given that they repeatedly led viewers and readers to believe Steele was a master spy.
Read the whole thing.
DANIEL GREENFIELD: Getting Coronavirus for Your Political Sins. “When Rep. Ben McAdams tested positive for coronavirus and was hospitalized, there was very little interest even though the Utah Democrat was one of the first House members to suffer from serious symptoms. But the media would rather tell punitive coronavirus allegories about people who not only got the virus but, in their telling, deserved to get it for their political sins. Like Republicans. That’s why when Rep. Louie Gohmert tested positive, without actually having any symptoms, the national media pounced on the story with headlines that emphasized the false claim that the Texas Republican had not been wearing a mask, even though he actually did wear a mask at House sessions.”
NOT THE BABYLON BEE: Portland’s NW Film Center cancels drive-in showing of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1990 film Kindergarten Cop, after SJW compares the action-comedy to Birth of a Nation.
On Saturday, Portland author Lois Leveen—whose writing credits include contributions to The New York Times and The Atlantic and the book The Secrets of Mary Bowser, a novel based on the life of a slave-turned-Union spy—took to Twitter to excoriate the organization for leading off its series with the movie.
“National reckoning on overpolicing is a weird time to revive Kindergarten Cop. IRL, we are trying to end the school-to-prison pipeline,” she tweeted. “There’s nothing entertaining about the presence of police in schools, which feeds the ‘school-to-prison’ pipeline in which African American, Latinx and other kids of color are criminalized rather than educated. Five- and 6-year-olds are handcuffed and hauled off to jail routinely in this country. And this criminalizing of children increases dramatically when cops are assigned to work in schools.”
In a message sent to [Willamette Week] over the weekend with the subject line “Kindergarten Cop-Out: Why Does NW Film Center Think There’s Anything Fun About Cops Traumatizing Schoolchildren,” Leveen elaborated on her concerns.
“It’s true Kindergarten Cop is only a movie. So are Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind, but we recognize films like those are not ‘good family fun,'” she wrote. “They are relics of how pop culture feeds racist assumptions.”
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Leveen also did not immediately respond to WW‘s request for further comment. But based on her Twitter response, the Film Center’s statement left her dissatisfied.
“I think what you meant to type was, ‘Yes, we made a grave error in not realizing the implicit racism in that programming decision. We apologize and are rethinking who makes our programming decisions hereafter.’ How deep a white normativity hole will @nwfilmcenter keep digging?”
I was going to compare the Portland Film Center’s spineless response to Trader Joe and Goya standing up to SJW cancel culture. But, forget it, Jake – it’s Portlandia.
TWO HAWGS FLARING IN CENTCOM: Two A-10 Thunderbolt IIs release countermeasure flares somewhere in the Central Command area of responsibility.
NEW YORK CITY’S HEALTH COMMISSIONER RESIGNS, CRITICIZING CORONAVIRUS HANDLING.
The very last paragraph of ABC’s article alludes to the infamous moment when Dr. Oxiris Barbot was quoted by the New York Post as saying “I don’t give two rats’ asses about your cops. I need them for others,” in March, when the NYPD requested 500,000 surgical masks from the health commissioner.
Missing is Barbot’s quote in early February regarding the mass gatherings at the Chinese Lunar New Year parade in Chinatown:
“The risk for New Yorkers of the coronavirus is low, and our preparedness as a city is very high. While it is understandable that people feel anxious, that is no way shape or form an excuse for them to use that as an opportunity to spread misinformation, to spread racist ideas because that is currently the greatest risk to New Yorker’s.”
Dr. Barbot said residents should instead, “come together, know the information and share that information.” But she warned, “rumors can be as dangerous as any virus.”
Better dead than rude, to coin a phrase.
WHEN STREET THEATER GETS TOO REAL: BLM Protester Stabbed in Portland as Another Anti-Police Protester Shouts, ‘Call the Police!.’
I WASN’T EXPECTING THIS EARTHSHATTERING KABOOM: Shocking videos capture massive explosion that just rocked the Lebanese capital of Beirut. They’re saying it was a fireworks factory, which is possible — one in Benton, Tennessee blew up years ago and it was colossal. It’s also possible that it was something a bit more . . . aggressive.
UPDATE: Warehouse, apparently, not factory.
I WON’T BE HAPPY UNTIL AMERICANS OWN MORE GUNS THAN THE REST OF THE WORLD PUT TOGETHER: July Breaks Gun Sales Record: Gun company’s earnings triple, CEO says sales ‘like nothing we’ve seen before.’ And when we get there — and we’re closer than you think — I’ll credit the Democrats and their hangers-on like Antifa and BLM.
DETAILS: Massive Explosions Rock Beirut. “An Israeli intelligence research outfit claimed that the explosion was ‘not a coincidence’ because it involved ‘one of the warehouses near the port, which has already been identified as part of Hezbollah’s missile accuracy project’.”