Archive for 2021

KURT SCHLICHTER: Refuse to Be Silenced.

Parler’s gone for now, the victim of a conspiracy to silence, but it will return. The fascists can try, but they can’t shut us up forever. Truth flows like water around obstacles. The Twitbookgram decided to start playing whack-a-prole to bonk unapproved ideas on the noggin and pretty soon too many heads will be popping up out of too many new holes. They will pop up on Gab, or Clouthub, or Dave Rubin’s Locals.com. People will find a way to be heard.

Once you leave their personal domains, the tech overlords become…irrelevant, and powerless.

Now, they can conspire, collaborate, and likely violate antitrust laws, though it is hilarious to assume that a Biden* DoJ will find anything out of sorts about that. The Democrat Party, and far too many Fredocon hacks in the GOP, are bought and paid for. They are happy to auction themselves off in a bidding war between Silicon Valley and Beijing. And there are a few remaining Muh Free Enterprisers who confuse capitalism and monopoly corporatism, and who are happy to surrender their sovereignty if their twisted principles so demand. But there is only so much the silicon villains can do. Eventually, some enterprising entrepreneur in Latvia is going to have a server farm no one in Cupertino can switch off.

They are shooting their wad, as far as the corporate tech censorship goes. It’s a hassle right now, but we will not be gagged. . . . Free speech, now and forever. No compromise, no exceptions, no excuses. It’s not enough to favor free speech – you must be affirmatively anti-censorship!

Read the whole thing.

OPEN THREAD: Are we having fun yet?

OPEN THREAD: Though I’m not paid, I play this game.

IT’S COME TO THIS: More U.S. Military Troops Needed To Install Joe Biden Than We Have in Afghanistan.

Related: Biden builds the wall! A 12-Foot Wall Is Going Up Around The Capitol To Protect Joe Biden And That’s Weird Because I’ve Been Repeatedly Told By Dems Like Joe Biden That Walls Are Immoral.

More: Federal prisons locked down ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration.

Last link found via Kenny Webster, who asks, “I’m sorry, the federal prisons weren’t locked down before the inauguration? Did they use an honor system with the prisoners or something?”

WE’RE PUTTING THE BAND BACK TOGETHER: Biden Is Already Rewarding Failure.

AFP reported Saturday that Biden has appointed Wendy Sherman, whose chief claim to fame is negotiating the notorious Iran nuclear deal, to be deputy secretary of state. It’s a classic example of failing up.

Biden said of Sherman and anti-Russia career diplomat Victoria Nuland, whom he named undersecretary for political affairs, that they “have secured some of the most defining national security and diplomatic achievements in recent memory. I am confident that they will use their diplomatic experience and skill to restore America’s global and moral leadership. America is back.”

And file this under “#Unity:” Bracing for the “flurry” of Biden’s day one executive orders.

BOMB CANADA: THE CASE FOR WAR. North Vancouver councillor says pickup truck is ‘glorification of violence’, ‘petro masculinity.’

Has he ever been to Texas? That pickup would be considered a subcompact here. Great response from Jesse Kelly, by the way:

Flashbacks: Boston Globe opinion columnist Renee Graham in October:

“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.”

(Classical reference in headline.)

VIETNAM WAR ‘NAPALM GIRL’ PHOTOGRAPHER DEFIES BACKLASH RISK AND ACCEPTS AWARD AT WHITE HOUSE; is assaulted following night. AP photographer Nick Ut and Trump “had met before, in Los Angeles, before Trump was elected president. Ut recalled in his essay that Trump ‘loved my picture of Vietnam. He said to me: ‘Nick, your picture changed the world.’”

There are plenty of myths surrounding that iconic photo; read the whole thing.

SLS UNDERPERFORMS: NASA’s moon rocket roars to life during shortened test-firing. There’s nothing wrong with a test that “fails,” of course. That’s how you learn. But SLS has been a series of failures, and the learning isn’t obvious.

UPDATE: A friend emails: “That static fire was the first time in the program that something finished ahead of schedule.”

COLLUSION: Another University Professor Charged In China Ties, Grant Fraud. “I’m not sure how many more of these we need to see before we realize that we’ve got a very serious China problem on our hands and it has nothing to do with their military (or at least not much) or their control of the global supply chain, though that’s a disaster of its own. China has been stocking up our country with spies and shoveling technological secrets out by the bucketload. Some of their biggest bases of operation are found in our universities, where their money allows them to get their hooks into American liberals who are very hungry for that sweet, sweet, Chinese cash cow.”

This time it’s at MIT.

AS ALWAYS, LIFE IMITATES THE EARLIER, FUNNIER SEASONS OF SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE: Episode 2: Barbarians at the Oval.

The White House became a strange ghost town in the days after the election. Trump’s schedule — already unstructured — became more so. It was impossible to shift his focus from his grievances about the election to important policy matters. In conversations in the Oval Office, Trump would occasionally slip and seem to acknowledge he lost, saying, “Can you believe I lost to that fucking guy? That fucking corpse?”

Jon Lovitz as Michael Dukakis in SNL’s 1988 parody of the second Bush-Dukakis debate: “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy!”