Archive for 2020

END OF ‘STARS & STRIPES”? It is if the Pentagon gets its way.

THANK A (REAL) FARMER THIS LABOR DAY: America must be the only place in the world where you can be an “active manager” of a farm that you never physically see, and yet the government gives you millions of tax dollars. Something I retrieved from the Weekly Wastebasket of Taxpayers for Common Sense.

THESE WOMEN KNOW THEIR BARRELS: Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito tells the story of the first women’s professional sports association organized by and for women.

THINGS GOT HILARIOUS WHEN: A little Saturday morning humor to start your Labor Day holiday. (LET ME KNOW IN THE COMMENTS IF YOU HAVE VOLUME PROBLEMS)

GIVE ME MY STASI AND YOU CAN DINE INDOORS: Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) lays down the law to all you plebes wanting to sit down and eat your Big Macs inside the McDonald’s.

YES, LET’S FOLLOW THE SCIENCE: Check out this useful, one-page capture of the key data about where we are on the Covid-19 situation. Wesbury COVID tracker — 6

HEH, INDEED: Sources: The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg weeps in his office ‘all the time.’

It might reasonably be argued that, if one does not wish to see mean tweets, one could simply not go on Twitter, but this approach seems unthinkable to Goldberg’s sources. So, secrecy it is. It is settled: spectacular, impossible-to-disprove, election-swinging allegations can be made by totally anonymously individuals leaking to a historically-gullible reporter.

And that’s a good thing, because Cockburn has something important to reveal: Unnamed sources from inside the Atlantic have shared disturbing information about editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg. According to these four unnamed sources, Goldberg lives in abject terror of his own staff, who are adamant that the Atlantic should be renamed the South China Sea.

Unnamed sources highly suggest reading the whole thing.

THE RIOTS AND “THE SORCERER’S APPRENTICE:”

Right now, the “we” is the left (books, the press, the education system, the Democratic Party), and the force that’s been called forth is the Antifa BLM mob. Elected politicians such as a mayor like Ted Wheeler of Portland or Jenny Durkan of Seattle have already glimpsed the army of broomsticks coming towards them to trample them. But this is no cartoon.

In Iran in 1979, the left played footsie with the Ayatollahs, thinking it could use them and that the left would win in the end. History tells us they were wrong. Right now in the US it’s left vs. left – the political, elected left (and the “useful idiot” liberals) versus the more anarchist/nihilist/sociopathic left such as Antifa. The first group is Mickey Mouse (in more ways than one) and the second group the broomsticks.

And the elected left may find that the spirits it has summoned cannot be banished.

As Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2005, “Liberals are geniuses at unleashing social panics because A) it never occurs to them that their motives are anything but pure and B) because they are almost exclusively focused on short term tactics. And yet they are invariably shocked when these moral frenzies come back to bite them. McCarthyism was a direct consequence of both the Red Scare and the Brown Scare. And when the tactics they mastered were turned on them, they acted as if they came from nowhere.”

FASCISTS GONNA FASCIST: ‘You’re Not Allowed To Film’: The Fight To Control Who Reports From Portland.

I wondered, the first time I attended the protests at the federal building back in July, who all these young people with PRESS emblazoned on their jackets or helmets were. I asked one such guy who he worked for.

“Independent Press Corps,” he told me. As it turned out, dozens of other young PRESS people happened to work for the same outfit, which I at first assumed was a fancy way of saying “I want to report stuff and stream it on my Instagram.”

This turned out to be naive. The IPC is an organized group in league with the activists, and it is usually their footage you see streamed online and recycled on the news: mostly innocent protestors being harassed and beaten by police.

The police indeed have tear-gassed and beaten people; there has been brutality. It is equally true, but featured less prominently in the news coverage, that activists spend hours every night menacing and setting fires to police stations and other institutions: City Hall, Immigration and Customs Enforcement headquarters, and last week Mayor Ted Wheeler’s apartment building (until he agreed to move out). With the PRESS crew recording part of the story and the “YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO FILM!” crew harassing other journalists, the result can be a misleading view of the protests. It’s a revolution via the cellphone video they allow you to see.

The IPC and other documentarians who are deemed sympathetic to the activists’ cause agree on certain principles. You do not show activists’ faces. You only show activists in a defensive position: responding to, rather than inciting, violence. You enhance what can appear to be police brutality, e.g., activists defending themselves with homemade shields, often bearing the anarchist circle-A, against police. The shields are largely ineffective for personal defense, but extremely effective for optics, and that’s precisely the point. If a member of the IPC is arrested, he or she will be protected.

Reporters seen as not sufficiently sympathetic to the cause—which is defined by the Ten Demands for Justice, and includes most notably the abolition of the police—will be followed, be harassed, have their notes photographed and their phones blocked or stolen. (All these things have happened to me in the last month. A photographer friend has been repeatedly doxxed and placed on a list of “enemies.”)

Like I said.

NO. THE MULTI ONES DON’T WORK ANY BETTER. WHAT WE NEED TO DO IS MAKE PEOPLE UNDERSTAND COMMUNISM IS AS UNACCEPTABLE — AND DEADLY — AS FASCISM:  Do We Need To Change the Two Party System?

I THINK WE SHOULD START BY DOCKING THEIR PAY AND TAKING AWAY THEIR PERKS AND PRIVILEGES. WHICH IN NANCY GREY GOOSE PELOSI’S CASE INCLUDES US BUYING HER ALCOHOL, A BILL THAT WOULD BANKRUPT THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES:  Elitism in a “public servant”.

IT GOES WITH THE FAKE PANDEMIC, THEIR FAKE CONCERN FOR THE COUNTRY…. LET’S FACE IT, THE DEMS ARE LARPING FULL TIME:  First we had fake news. Now we have…