Archive for 2020
November 1, 2020
AN ARTICLE FOR OUR RUSSIAN TROLL COMMENTERS: Explosively old and cranky. A look at the numerous fires and explosions in Russian ammunition dumps and storage sites. Also some exported “explosive problems.”
ANGLING FOR FROGMEN: In the Philippine Sea, a USAF CV-22 Osprey conducts a search-and-rescue exercise with the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan.
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Why should The Strand survive?
As it happened, on my last trip The Strand had none of the books I was looking for. I wasn’t searching for any viciously right-wing tracts. The store had simply decided to go big and long on the ‘improving’ literature that it seeks to push on New Yorkers (Kendi, Coates, DiAngelo and all the rest) and it had done so at the expense of the variety and pluralism it once displayed. For instance near the front entrance on my last visit there stood a considerable quantity of the book (notorious to the readers of this publication) titled In Defense of Looting. Were I not on a guest in the country I should have picked up that whole steaming pile, walked out of the door and dumped them on the kerbside. For aside from believing that the author of that book should be taken at their word, it is quite something for a shop in a town that recently suffered an outbreak of looting to be prominently promoting a book which explains not only why ‘all cops are bastards’ but why the looting of other people’s businesses – businesses sometimes just as old and venerable as The Strand, incidentally – is not just fine but justified. Of course a store should stock a book. But what they push tells you where they stand.
So I understand why people might flock to The Strand when the call goes out to save it. They lingered there for many an hour in their student years. Which literary visitor to the city has not, in the past, left the place with an overweight luggage-case full of books? But The Strand is not the store that it once was. It has become another improbable victim of the culture wars, offering an ever-smaller selection of ‘good-for-you’ fare to a clearly dwindling number of customers. Sad, but not inevitable.
It’s telling that uber-woke books such as the aforementioned “’improving’ literature” and the now infamous In Defense of Looting don’t sound like they’re flying off the shelves even in far left Manhattan, the city with the reincarnation of Batman’s Marxist supervillain Bane as their mayor, and a shrinking population of true leftist believers as his constituency.
JUST A FEW WEEKS AGO, ALL THE SMART PEOPLE SAID HE WAS DOOMED FROM COVID BECAUSE HE WAS OLD AND OVERWEIGHT: White House Report Card: Trump leaves it all out there in his high-energy campaign.
IF YOU’RE RELYING ON SOCIAL MEDIA, YOU NEED TO CHOOSE AN ALTERNATIVE PLATFORM NOW: N.J. Women For Trump group, with 29K members, removed from Facebook days before election.
I BLAME RON DESANTIS: UK announces second lockdown as COVID-19 cases surge.
CAPITALISM: THE REALLY UNKNOWN IDEAL IN PORTLANDIA: Everything you need to know about Portland’s likely new socialist mayor can be found by looking at how she views “your” money.
I put “your” in scare quotes because it’s not entirely clear Portland mayoral candidate Sarah Iannarone believes it’s actually yours.
As a reminder, we’re talking about this Sarah Iannarone.
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Anyway, to really understand Iannarone, you have to understand her view of your money, and to do so I’m going to dissect one section from her “Housing For All” plan.
“There is a significant amount of money available across the spectrum of housing options flowing into the city from various pipelines…”
I like this visual, a pipeline. Sucking money from my wallet. (Although it is a bit surprising as I thought progressives were against pipelines.)
Note also that this money is “available.” Sounds kind of benign, like picking daisies from an open field, only it’s your field, and armed government agents have come to pick them.
“There is significant tax inequity between property owners in East Portland and the rest of the city that needs to be evaluated and corrected through assessment recalibration and possible implementation of a land value tax (LVT).”
“Tax inequity” that must be “evaluated” so as to have a “recalibration.”
Hint: your taxes are going up, confiscatorily.
Well, unless you live in East Liberty which houses most of Portland’s minority population and tends to suffer from higher poverty rates. Iannarone’s fondness for a Land Value Tax kind of gives away her agenda.
In other news from Portlandia, a Grauniad columnist discovers that the city wasn’t the socialist pipe dream she was expecting: We left the UK for Portland expecting a liberal dream. That wasn’t the reality. Unexpectedly!
The first surprise was the lack of non-white people. I later discovered that the 2010 census found Portland to be the whitest big city in the US. When our daughter started daycare, she came home and said she didn’t like her brown skin; she wanted to be white like the other kids. She was three. I felt like a fool for moving her out of a city where she would have been surrounded by people who look like her.
Living in Portland was also the first time I felt noticed for being in a mixed-race marriage. In rural Oregon, where you now regularly see Trump signs and bumper stickers, it’s become an unsaid agreement between my husband and I that I get out of the car as little as possible. He goes into the gas stations; he checks us into motels. I was horrified but not surprised when, during the fires, armed vigilantes set up “checkpoints” in small towns – claiming they were worried about “antifa looting”. They stopped drivers and asked them to identify themselves.
I write all of this as a brown person and a recent transplant. Racism for black people in Portland is far more pervasive and damaging. It’s visible in housing policy, police brutality and who gets to work where. In 1859, when Oregon joined the union, it was the only state to explicitly ban all black people living there. That legacy of racism has cast a long shadow. As recently as the 1990s, lenders in the state engaged in redlining (not giving people loans and mortgages because of where they live – which mainly affected the city’s small black population). There continues to be de facto racial segregation in schools. But, until this summer, Portland’s white population didn’t talk about it much.
Portland’s last Republican mayor served for a little over a year from September of 1979 to November of 1980. Prior to that, its last Republican mayor to serve a full term left office at the end of 1956. Why are Democrat monopoly cities such cesspits of racism?
(Classical reference in headline.)
GREAT MOMENTS IN DISPASSIONATE OBJECTIVITY: Sam Harris: ‘Osama bin Laden is far more understandable to me and far less reprehensible than Trump.’
Sam Harris is a famous atheist and a self-professed “rationalist,” but here he demonstrates that the Left’s hatred for Trump can race far beyond all the bounds of rationality and become cultlike in its perfervid intensity. Sam Harris has spoken critically about Islamic jihad violence in the past, but he allowed himself to be intimidated into silence about the root causes of that violence, and came out in opposition to any and all effective counter-jihad measures. Sam also recently unmasked himself as a fascist foe of the freedom of speech.
In light of all that, this revolting dive into the most fetid dumpster of Trump Hatred, and awe-inspiring example of moral myopia, is not altogether unexpected. But that doesn’t make it any less reprehensible.
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In an audio clip uploaded to his Facebook account on the 19th of February, he explains his position in detail. Sam Harris says, “I find Trump more despicable than I found Osama bin Laden… With Osama bin Laden, it’s just obvious to me that he could have been a mensch in some sense, right? He’s making serious sacrifices for ideas that he deeply believes in. He’s committed to a cause greater than himself.”
The deluded atheist continued, “I don’t doubt he had real ethical connections to the people in his life that he cared about. He’s a real person, right? And in some ways, he is kind of a moral hero in a very bad game. And so therefore, he’s kind of prototypically evil when viewed from my game. he’s a person of actual substance- he’s just committed to the wrong ends, whereas Trump is the negation of all those things.”
It is thus quite clear that ‘peak rational atheist’ Sam Harris believes that Donald Trump, under whose administration historic peace deals were signed between sworn enemies in the Middle East, is more reprehensible than the Islamic terrorist who brought down the Twin Towers and unleashed death, destruction and carnage across the world.
But Harris isn’t alone when it comes to that level of moral equivalence. Here’s Boston Globe opinion columnist Renee Graham yesterday:
“The top 3 best selling vehicles in America are pick-ups. Question to reporters: do you personally know someone that owns one?”, Ace of Spades’ John Ekdahl asked on Twitter at the beginning of 2017. As Sean Davis of the Federalist noted in his article on that seemingly innocuous tweet, “Watch A Bunch Of Journalists Freak Out After Being Asked If They Know Anybody Who Drives A Truck.”
And from an MSM journalist this past August: “Sales of mega-pickups, which have basically been deliberately designed to intimidate and kill pedestrians, are booming.”
THIS DOESN’T SOUND LIKE PEOPLE WHO EXPECT A BIG WIN: #ShutDownDC Plans to Target Republicans During Election-Week Protests.
October 31, 2020
DONALD SENSING: What will you do when they come for you?
OPEN THREAD: Insert Halloween-themed reference here.
IT’S AS RELIABLE AS THE POLLS: Forget the Polls: This Chinese Indicator Is Flashing ‘Trump.’ “The measure is unscientific at best. But merchants say sales of the president’s campaign merchandise at a major wholesale market are outstripping Biden’s.”
Don’t get cocky.
NATIONAL REVIEW: TRUMP? HELL, YES. “The case for Trump: Antics aside, he has many achievements, and a win by Biden would do vast harm.”
UNSURPRISING: Philadelphia Firefighters Union Confirms Trump Endorsement in Forced Recount.
Earlier in October, the union representing Philadelphia firefighters voted to endorse Donald Trump. This was no small undertaking, given the overwhelming support of most unions for Joe Biden. When some union members complained about the process, a second vote was conducted. Trump won that vote by a two-to-one margin. . . .
“It’s a huge win for Trump,” a source in the department told PJ Media. “Firefighters are overwhelmingly sacrificing future contract increases with a Democrat-run city to try and get Trump re-elected. It’s actually quite profound.” The vote and the revote further indicate how little support the radical Democrats and their police-defunding agenda get from first responders around the country.
It’s hard to expect firefighters to endorse a party of arsonists.
LEFTIES AT STANFORD TRY TO USE COVID-19 AS an excuse to get rid of the Hoover Institution.
NICK OWENS, RIP: Matt Mackowiak’s tribute is truly touching. And a useful insight into Washington’s 20-30 Something culture that is hardly different today from when I arrived in 1976.
HE’S RIGHT, ALAS:
The press can’t be trusted to play the role of honest interlocutor anymore, and that’s very destructive. But an honest interlocutor needs to be honest, and they lack the self-discipline and sense of professional mission to do that.
Meanwhile, these folks don’t sound like they’re preparing for an easy Biden victory: Celeb-packed apartments to be protected by armed guards on Election Day.
Related thoughts here.