SORRY, THAT WOULD INTERFERE WITH GRAFT FOR POLITICIANS AND SLAVE LABOR FOR CORPORATIONS: How About Boycotting China?
Archive for 2021
April 3, 2021
MICHEL FOUCAULT AND THE GLAMOUR OF EVIL:
News that Michel Foucault molested children recalls revelations that Hulk Hogan used steroids. The surprise comes only in response to surprise.
“Young children were running after Foucault saying, ‘What about me? Take me, take me,’ ” French Legion of Honor officer Guy Sorman told the Times of London about an Easter weekend trip to Tunisia during the late 1960s. “They were eight, nine, ten years old, he was throwing money at them and would say, ‘Let’s meet at 10 p.m. at the usual place.’ ”
The usual place was an unusual place: a graveyard. There, the living grossed out the dead. “He would make love there on the gravestones with young boys,” Sorman explains. “The question of consent wasn’t even raised.”
There, participants willing and coerced engaged in a pantomime of Foucault’s postmodernism, a philosophy in which power, not truth or ethics or justice, mattered above all, above a captive audience of the disgusted departed.
Flashback: Zhou Enlai Gets His Answer: In 1972, during his meeting with President Nixon, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was famously misquoted that he thought that it was “Too early to say” what the results of the French Revolution of 1789 were. According to W. Joseph Campbell at his Media Myth Alert blog, Zhou thought he was being asked about the 1968 revolution in France. That answer is now in.
WOKE CAPITALISM COMES TO GEORGIA…BUT NOT CHINA:
In March 2020, a Congressional Executive Commission on human-rights abuses in Xinjiang listed Coca-Cola as a major American company with ties to forced labor camps in the Chinese province. Other companies on the list included Nike, Adidas, Calvin Klein, Campbell’s Soup Company, CostCo, H&M (who has since distanced themselves from China and paid a price for it), Patagonia and Tommy Hilfiger. The report went on to specifically name Coca-Cola’s COFO Tunhe sugar facility in Xinjiang as having direct ties to forced labor. It was reported in the New York Times in November of last year that Coca-Cola was one of the primary companies lobbying against congressional legislation targeting companies who engaged with China’s forced labor policies. The New York Times piece said ‘Lobbyists have fought to water down some of its provisions, arguing that while they strongly condemn forced labor and current atrocities in Xinjiang, the act’s ambitious requirements could wreak havoc on supply chains that are deeply embedded in China.’
Quincey will likely not have to answer for these corporate hypocrisies while appearing on friendly media outlets who also do not want to see Chinese threats to their valuable media markets.
Delta Airlines was another high profile company to wade into the debate around SB-202. CEO Ed Bastian, in a company-wide statement declared ‘I need to make it crystal clear that the final bill is unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values… The entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie: that there was widespread voter fraud in Georgia in the 2020 elections. This is simply not true. Unfortunately, that excuse is being used in states across the nation that are attempting to pass similar legislation to restrict voting rights.’ The bill however was signed into law by Brian Kemp, who faced heavy pressure from former president Donald Trump and his acolytes to decertify the 2020 election results from Georgia.
Guess what? Delta Airlines, in a partnership with China, agreed last August to add additional flights to China. This occurred while the United States and countries around the world were still in the grips of a global pandemic, which originated in and was initially covered up by China. And Major League Baseball has just caved under pressure to relocate the annual All-Star game from Atlanta, an idea bravely endorsed by President Biden in an ESPN interview Wednesday night. The MLB, much like the NBA, has been eager to expand its market into China in recent years. In 2017, Major League Baseball struck a deal to construct 20 new baseball centers in China for developing talent. In 2018, the MLB cut a deal with Tencent Technologies to stream MLB games in Chinese markets.
As Jim Geraghty wrote in October of 2019, when the CCP-NBA connection was exposed for millions of Americans to see, in a sort of prelude to what was to come the following year: We’re Not Exporting Our Values to China — We’re Importing Theirs.
SOUTH DAKOTA HAS A NEW STAND YOUR GROUND LAW: And so do several other states. Is the hysteria over these laws dying down? (Here’s my take from last year.)
WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELLWORLD WHERE TED RALL IS A VOICE OF REASON: The Spy Who Loved Me? Check It Out: Reporters uncritically echo intel agencies’ election claims. Did they learn nothing from the Iraq war?
If your mother says she loves you, check it out, goes an old reporter’s saying. What if the intelligence community says so?
On March 15 the National Intelligence Council declassified an “intelligence community assessment” titled “Foreign Threats to the 2020 Federal Election.” From a journalistic standpoint, the section titled “sources of information” is of interest. It says only that “we considered intelligence reporting and other information made available to the Intelligence Community as of 31 December 2020.”
To put that in layman’s terms: Some of our guys told us stuff. We won’t tell you who or why you should trust them, and we won’t show you any evidence that backs them up. The intelligence community is making a bald appeal to its own authority—an authority of which journalists have good reason to be skeptical.
Organizations like the Central Intelligence Agency have a history of propagating disinformation to media outlets. Their biases are obvious: They exist not to report the truth but to disrupt foreign adversaries and, at least in theory, to further American interests. Formally they answer to the president and are overseen by Congress, but they also protect their parochial interests like all bureaucracies.
And it’s become pretty clear which is the priority.
THE DAM BUSTERS FACE THEIR TOUGHEST MISSION YET: SURVIVING CANCEL CULTURE.
My latest article, over at Ed Driscoll.com.
(Bumped.)
CLASS WARFARE IN AMERICA: The Well-Heeled Professoriate: Socioeconomic Backgrounds Of University Faculty. “If your aspiration is to become a university faculty member some day, here’s a bit of advice: choose your parents wisely. Turns out that university faculty are, on average, 25 times more likely to have had a parent with a PhD than the general population. In addition, those faculty tended to grow up in neighborhoods that had a 24% higher median income than the general public.”
Plus: “The intergenerational trajectories found here are probably not unique to academia. As the authors point out, similar effects have been reported for individuals entering other white-collar careers like law and medicine.”
Gentry class gonna be gentry class.
JOE BIDEN, ANDREW CUOMO, RALPH NORTHAM, AND JUSTIN FAIRFAX COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: Rep. Matt Gaetz Says He’s Not Stepping Down as Communications Director Resigns.
HERE’S WHAT BIDEN SHOULD DO IF HE REALLY WANTS GOOD-PAYING UNION JOBS NOW:
From Texas to California, unfinished sections of the wall have become convenient gateways for migrants to enter the U.S. Near the gaps, Border agents park their vehicles to monitor the access points.
Smugglers send groups of asylum seekers through the gaps to overwhelm the agents. When agents leave to intercept or apprehend one group, another group scampers across.
“It’s insane,” said an agent attending to a group of 13 Brazilian migrants apprehended Tuesday near a 100-foot gap in the fence in Otay Mesa, Ca. “The project is ¾ done. At least, they should be allowed to tie together the primary fence. Otherwise, we’re trying to catch these people in the worst possible place. It’s just sucking our manpower.”
Flashback: Jared Bernstein, member of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors: “One thing we learned in the 1990s was that a surefire way to reconnect the fortunes of working people at all skill levels, immigrant and native-born alike, to the growing economy is to let the job market tighten up. A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers to get and keep the workers they need. One equally surefire way to sort-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.”
Or to put it another way:
IF ONLY: Everyone is a libertarian at the end of a pandemic.
If the ineptitude wasn’t so infuriating, it might make for entertaining TV. There was the episode when the smug governor who asked his constituents to stay home got caught dining at French Laundry. Or what about the one when the White House coronavirus response coordinator broke her own travel restrictions to winterize her vacation home — and got ratted out by members of her own family?
The past 12 months have showcased non-stop hypocrisy from our federal and local officials. Most Americans, despite the mental exhaustion, are tuning in to this freak show daily.
Our betters originally told us sheep that we had to lock down the country for two weeks in order to ‘stop the spread’. So we did just that. Fast-forward a year and after shutdowns, masks, contact-tracing, remote-working and Zoom-learning — we are all still waiting for the Powers That Be to loosen the reins. Instead they are extending deadlines and moving goalposts. The longer they wait to let up, the bigger the coming anti-government backlash will be.
Bring it on.
Related (From Ed): COVID-19 alarmism is working, new polls show. That’s a huge problem.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. It’s Important To Be Honest About What Today’s Media Actually Are.
The term for people who lobby for Democrat policies in this clumsy of a manner is “Democrat activists in the propaganda field,” certainly not reporters, or journalists. They need to be treated as what they are.
It’s time to stop acting like these political activists are professionals who do honest journalism. Continuing that pretense is not doing a favor to the public. It’s not true. With very few exceptions, these people are not there to do journalism, and we need to be honest about that with the public. Not everyone is as bad as everyone else, but nearly the entire press corps is somewhere on the Democrat activist scale, from lefty to fringe, from shrewd to clumsy and clownish.
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If You’re A GOP Official, Grow A Spine
Now, if you’re a conservative leader of some kind, or an elected Republican official, the requirements are much higher. Maybe you don’t have Trump’s courage in taking on the media, but you must still do your part.
As a start, stop thinking of the corporate press as anything other than Democrat partisan activists and propaganda pushers. Have some self-respect and recognize this reality. My goodness, is it embarrassing to see the fealty and subservience that Republican and conservative “leaders” have in the face of the propagandists.
On Sunday, Rep. Michael Waltz taught a master’s class in how to handle propaganda from a CNN host.
Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky always does an excellent job of understanding media’s false assumptions enough to immediately push back on them.
Paul’s “interview” by badgering Clinton flack George Stephanopoulos is also well worth a watch.
UPDATE: In the above article, Mollie Hemingway writes:
“How far are you willing to go to achieve those promises that you made to the American people?” asked the Associated Press’s Zeke Miller, who also heads the White House Correspondents Association, pressuring Biden to help the media and other Democrat activists to end the Senate filibuster. Miller views his job, accurately, as an adjunct of the Biden White House, heading up its media division, as opposed to something independent from the Democratic Party.
He sure does: “On the evening of January 20, TIME White House correspondent Zeke Miller incorrectly reported that the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from [President Trump’s] Oval Office.”
(H/T, fellow Insta-co-blogger Charles Glasser. Updated and bumped.)
THE KING OF THE GEEZER TEASERS: Inside Randall Emmett’s direct-to-video empire, where many Hollywood stars have found lucrative early retirement.
Among these actors are John Travolta, Nicolas Cage, and Sylvester Stallone. But perched atop the ignominious heap is Bruce Willis, whose prolific partnership with EFO Films, one of the biggest players in this niche of the industry, results in as many as four or five movies each year.
“With Bruce Willis, there’s almost a model for how he features in these movies,” Champ theorized. “One of my clients calls it a ‘geezer teaser’: You have Bruce Willis at the intro of the movie, so people are like, Great, this is a Bruce Willis movie. But he’s actually a secondary character who shows up sporadically.”
In most of Willis’s movies for EFO, “sporadic” would be a generous appraisal of his presence. The actor clocks just seven minutes of screen time in Hard Kill, and in Extraction, he spends less than nine minutes onscreen. In the home-invasion thriller Survive the Night, audiences get almost ten minutes out of the actor, even if they aren’t his best.
The audience being teased by these brief performances seems to consist largely of men older than 35 who spent their teen years renting Jean-Claude Van Damme movies from their local video stores. In that era, as Bertrand Reignier, another Daro Films executive, puts it, action stars like Seagal and Van Damme made relatively cheap movies “with nothing to sell them except for the artwork on the box and maybe an action-packed trailer.” This demographic has now helped fuel the multibillion-dollar VOD market, a virtual replica of a Blockbuster Video.
The halcyon days Reignier describes were dominated by a company called the Cannon Group. When it was acquired by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus in 1979, Cannon was a debt-ridden indie studio known for English-language versions of Swedish soft-core porn films. But in just a few short years, these Israeli cousins transformed the studio into a “mini-major” by tapping into America’s insatiable appetite for B-movies like Enter the Ninja and Cobra and producing an endless string of sequels to hits like Death Wish, The Delta Force, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. By the mid-’80s, Cannon was doing business with Avi Lerner, owner of South Africa’s Nu Metro movie-theater chain. Lerner had started his own film-production company, called Nu Metro Entertainment, to meet the local needs of studios. He served as a producer on Cannon films such as American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt and River of Death. By 1992, Lerner, who is also Israeli, had moved to L.A. and started producing his own low-budget films, specializing in direct-to-video “mockbusters” like Freefall (meant to capitalize on the success of Stallone’s Cliffhanger) and made-for-television creature features like Shark Attack.
If you’re curious to see how the B-movie sausage gets made in Hollywood, it’s well worth a read.
BRADLEY THOMPSON: Obey the Grand Inquisitor! Tyranny and the Politics of the Common Good.