SWEDISH ELECTION: “Crime Surge Put Sweden’s Social Democrats on Brink of Defeat.” (That’s with 94% of the votes counted.)
Archive for 2022
September 11, 2022
SOCIAL CREDIT SCORING COMES TO AMERICA: Visa, Mastercard, AmEx to start categorizing gun shop sales.
Imagine if they were doing this about abortion. Or if legislatures tried to make them do so.
A reader comments: “Have you seen this yet? It sure feels like there is a very coordinated effort throughout the woke financial sector to create ‘private’ gun control. I wonder if it is being driven by interaction with the ATF, etc like the censoring of private speech by coordination between government and social media. Also, wouldn’t this enable the card companies to create a gun registry? The credit card transactions include our names and what we bought and the card company knows our addresses, etc. Seems like another example of actual fascism where government coerces private companies to do their bidding.”
Based on experience, the likelihood that this is happening without government encouragement is very low.
UPDATE: Can I call ’em, or what? Sen. Warren wants credit card companies to track gun and ammunition purchases.. “Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and a group of nearly 40 congressional Democrats are urging credit card companies to track gun and ammunition purchases. It would be the first step to facilitating the collection of data that could help law enforcement identify domestic terrorism threats, they say in a letter sent last week to executives at Mastercard, Visa and American Express.”
They’ve also made clear that “domestic terrorism” is now just a synonym for “political opposition.”
ADVICE: The Left Hires Its Zealots. So Should the Right.
Personnel is policy.
OPEN THREAD: Speak your mind.
COMING SOON TO NETFLIX: A German-Language Version of All Quiet on the Western Front.
Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) was arguably the first, and inarguably, amongst the very best anti-war movies ever made. Adapted from Erich Maria Remarque’s 1928 novel, which Remarque based on his own experiences as a German soldier in the trenches of World War I, the film went on to win Oscars for best picture and best director. All Quiet on the Western Front was remade for American television in 1979, with Richard Thomas and Ernest Borgnine.
But it has taken nearly a century since the publication of Remarque’s book for it to be adapted in German, the language in which it was written. Partly, this has to do with the book’s history in the Third Reich. The Nazis banned and burned copies of All Quiet on the Western Front for its “treasonous”, and decidedly unheroic, depiction of war. Remarque’s story follows Paul Bäumer, a student who, inspired by his teacher’s patriotic speeches, leads his class to volunteer to serve on the front. But that patriotic fervor does not survive the first day of battle. What follows is a brutal, and shockingly honest, depiction of the horror and trauma of war and the toll, both physical and psychological, that it takes on the young men who fight.
Capturing that horror, and giving a very unheroic cinematic vision of war, was one of the main goals for director Edward Berger in his new, German-language adaption of All Quiet on the Western Front. The film, which premieres Sept.12 at the Toronto Film Festival, stars newcomer Felix Kammerer Bäumer, Albrecht Schuch (System Crasher) as his brother-in-arms Stanislaus Katczinsky, and star Daniel Brühl (Rush, Inglourious Basterds) as a German diplomat negotiating his country’s surrender in the war’s final days.
All Quiet on the Western Front was just named Germany’s official entry for the 2023 Oscars in the Best International Feature category. After its TIFF premiere, the film will go out in select theaters in Germany on Sept. 29, in the U.K from Oct. 14 and after an exclusive engagement at the Paris Theater in New York from Oct.7, in select theaters in the US from Oct.14. It bows on Netflix worldwide Oct.28.
The trailer looks epic:
Though looking at the poster atop the film’s Wikipedia page, I thought it starred Scarlett Johansson for second!
Of course, we all know that this new remake will never top the epic chemistry and cinematography of the aforementioned 1979 made for TV version staring Richard Thomas (fresh off playing John Boy in The Waltons) and Ernest Borgnine…
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Columbia Admits Submitting Incorrect Data That Goosed Its U.S. News Ranking To #2.
THE CALLS ARE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE! Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) Equates “Election Deniers” With Terrorists On the Anniversary of 9/11:
“I remember, as most Americans do, where they were on 9/11. I was in the middle of a political campaign and suddenly, the differences with my opponent seem very small in comparison and our country came together. And in many ways, we defeated the terrorists because of the resilience of the American public because of our intelligence community, and we are safer, better prepared,” Warner told CBS’s “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan.
“The stunning thing to me is here we are 20 years later, and the attack on the symbol of our democracy was not coming from terrorists, but it came from literally insurgents attacking the Capitol on January 6th,” he added.
Warner said that he felt the country is “stronger,” and the “intelligence community has performed remarkably,” compared to 21 years ago.
“I think the threat of terror has diminished,” he said.
However, he added that he’s concerned about internal threats.
“But I do worry about some of the activity in this country where the election deniers, the insurgency that took place on January 6th, that is something I hope we could see that same kind of unity of spirit,” he said.
Warner might to start by rooting out “election deniers” in his own party: Of Course: Defeated Democrat Congressman Claims Election Was ‘Stolen’ by Republican.
Mere weeks ago, Joe Biden declared that anyone who questions the results of an election is a “threat to our democracy.”
“Democracy cannot survive when one side believes that there are only two outcomes to an election: either they win or they were cheated,” he said.
Biden claimed this is something unique to MAGA Republicans, but in reality, Democrats frequently refuse to recognize the legitimacy of elections they lose. The latest example is the Democrat congressman who lost the special election for Texas’s 34 Congressional District to Republican Mayra Flores, whom he claims stole the election from him.
“Our democracy is at stake…there’s millions and millions of dollars from outside our region and outside our state that are coming here to try to steal our elections and take away your value and take away the process that we rely on, which is elections,” Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas) said. “And we don’t have the resources to compete with these outside resources. We can’t compete with the Koch brothers, we can’t compete with big oil, and big tobacco, and the NRA. They can outspend us, but they can’t outwork us.”
Gonzalez is far from alone in being a Democratic Party “election denier:” Karine Jean-Pierre Easily Tagged As An ‘Election Denier.’
As well as these ladies and gentlemen:
JOHN MCWHORTER RESPONDS TO A LAZY, BIGOTED ASSAULT ON CLARENCE THOMAS:
As it happens, I just came upon an Esquire article that opens with generous passages in Gullah creole, a dialect similar to Guyanese created by enslaved Black people in and around the Sea Islands of the American Southeast. Its author, Mitchell Jackson, has written a piece on Justice Clarence Thomas that begins in the small Black Georgia town Thomas grew up in, with narration rendered in the Gullah that some locals speak among themselves.
This is intended as a way of shivving Thomas — to point up a contrast between Thomas’s modest Black working-class roots and his life now, circulating happily in largely affluent, white circles, supposedly unconcerned with the welfare of the people he was raised among.
Jackson argues that Thomas’s conservative jurisprudence is fundamentally anti-Black and that therefore Thomas is a broken, sinister figure sabotaging his own people out of disgust with his own Blackness. “We’ve never seen a Black man this powerful this bent on harming other Black folks,” writes Jackson. “He’s alien to me because I love my people and I can see in his hardened heart he’s against us.”
This presumptuous — cartoonish, really — presentation is questionable as analysis. Among other things, it elides the nuance offered fairly recently by the Brooklyn College political scientist Corey Robin, the author of “The Enigma of Clarence Thomas.” Robin, certainly no acolyte of Thomas’s, explains how Thomas’s jurisprudence, whether one agrees with it, is rooted in a coherent and by no means malevolent philosophy compatible in many ways with Black nationalism. As Robin writes, “Thomas is not a conservative man who happens to be Black. Thomas is a Black man whose conservatism is overwhelmingly defined by and oriented toward the interests of Black people, as he understands them.” Jackson’s take, on the other hand, is not only crude and hasty but also written as if the shopworn Thomas-as-race-traitor thesis is something new.
In our moment, we talk a lot about the dismaying degree of partisanship in our nation. We declare fealty to the ideal of being open to the ideas of others. Yet Jackson exemplifies a sense that when it comes to Thomas, none of this interest in comity applies and that it qualifies as insight to discuss him as a horrid, pathetic figure. Once again, apparently, there is a single Black way to think, with Black conservatism valuable only as a demonstration of what Black opinion is not supposed to be.
It’s worthwhile, one would think, to assume first that people’s intentions are good ones. Writing someone off as monstrous should be a matter of last resort. To go with that immediately makes for good theater, but it’s also a kind of ritualistic hostility. . . . Jackson’s article is bile.
There’s a lot of that passing for thought these days, especially when the subject is Clarence Thomas.
HIGH ANXIETY: RACISM, THE LAW, AND LEGAL EDUCATION. “Conspicuously absent from the United States’ ongoing discourse about its racist history is a more honest discussion about the individual and personal stressors that are evoked in people when they talk about racism. What if they got it wrong? The fear of being cancelled — the public shaming for remarks that are deemed racist — has had a chilling effect on having meaningful conversations about racism. What lost opportunities! This paper moves this discussion into the law school context. How might law schools rethink their law school curricula to more accurately represent the role systemic racism has played in shaping the law while still respecting community members’ different perspectives about racism pedagogy? As in our broader society, law school community members’ fear of ‘getting it wrong’ and possibly being cancelled has had a chilling effect on having candid conversations about racism within legal education and the law.”
The chilling effect is entirely intentional, and much talk about race today is bad-faith power-seeking.
THE HYPOCRISY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES ON THE QUEEN VS. GORBACHEV:
Hey, no bias there!
This week the world learned of the passing of England’s 96 year old Queen Elizabeth II. A couple weeks ago Russia’s 91 year old Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Communist Soviet Union, passed away. And the difference in coverage in the media was, shall we say, interesting.
The New York Times published an essay by one Maya Jasanoff. Jasanoff is described as “a professor of history at Harvard, is the author of three books about the British Empire and its subjects.” The title of her essay:
Mourn the Queen, Not Her Empire
Among other things Professor Jasanoff says this on the Times pages beneath a photo of the Queen with the leaders of the British Commonwealth:
“What you would never know from the pictures — which is partly their point — is the violence that lies behind them. In 1948 the colonial governor of Malaya declared a state of emergency to fight communist guerrillas, and British troops used counterinsurgency tactics the Americans would emulate in Vietnam.”
Fighting communist guerrillas is bad? Hmmm. Also, 1948? Elizabeth didn’t become queen until 1952.
Contrast this with the Times obituary of Gorbachev’s death.
Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Reformist Soviet Leader, Is Dead at 91
Adopting principles of glasnost and perestroika, he weighed the legacy of seven decades of Communist rule and set a new course, presiding over the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.
If you really want to see the Times slobber over a much bloodthirstier Communist, read their obit for Stalin: “Stalin Rose From Czarist Oppression to Transform Russia Into Mighty Socialist State.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN DIVERSITY: Private School Diversity Director: ‘BIPOC Students’ Must be Protected from ‘White Gaze.’
The Director of Diversity and Inclusion for a private school in Baltimore expressed support for racial segregation in order to protect students from the “white gaze” and promoted turning children into woke activists.
Kalea Selmon, the Director of Diversity and Inclusion at Maryvale Preparatory School, gave a presentation where she argued that nonwhite students must be given spaces away from white students and described how those who work in education can use students as activists.
The presentation was given at the People of Color Conference, which is hosted by the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) and tells teachers and administration how to embed the tenets of Critical Race Theory into their schools. The NAIS is America’s largest accreditation agency for K-12 private schools.
In a video of part of her presentation, Selmon claims that “BIPOC spaces are sacred.” The term stands for “Black, Indigenous, People of Color.”
Selmon then goes on to say “It’s necessary for BIPOC students to have space away from white gaze and that it is absolutely okay to give black and brown students things you’re not giving white children because the white children are fine.”
So the spaces are separate — and equal as well?
I HAD ONE OF THESE, A 2012 MODEL HYBRID, AND IT WAS A GREAT CAR: 2023 Lexus RX Refills the Same Prescription.
NEVER FORGET THE COVID FASCISTS:
I submit to you that the COVID policies—shutdowns and lockdowns; “stay home, stay safe;” mandatory masking, social distancing, testing, and vaccines; and so on—perpetuated by the American left and those like-minded were the greatest demonstration of fascism the United States has ever known. In the nearly 250-year history of the U.S., never before has the American government exercised such power over its citizenry as it did in the name of “slowing the spread,” “following the science,” and the like. And never before in the history of the U.S. has the exercise of government power been so misinformed and misguided, with such disastrous results.
Of course, with elections looming, in an attempt to escape responsibility for their COVID tyranny, Democrats and their lackeys in the media want to blame “the pandemic,” and whenever possible, Donald Trump and the MAGA agenda. For example, last week, the American drive-by media widely reported on the “dismal learning loss” suffered by U.S. students “due to the pandemic.” The idea that “the pandemic erased two decades of progress in math and reading” was frequently parroted by said media.
Tens of millions of American students suffered far more than “learning loss” from the late winter of 2020 until now, but almost none of this was “due to the pandemic.” Rather, it was all due to a widespread foolish—and often downright evil—reaction to the pandemic.
When confronted with the national test results that revealed the scope of the “learning loss” suffered by U.S. students, “turning reality on its head,” the Biden administration pointed the finger at Trump and the GOP and said that re-opening schools “was the work of Democrats in spite of Republicans.” As Guy Benson at Townhall.com noted, this is a “brazen lie.”
Indeed, one of the political reasons that schools remained closed in Democratic party areas and states for as long as they did is because President Trump called for them to be open, and because designated villains, like Gov. Ron DeSantis, were following the data and permitting in-person learning to resume. In an era of negative partisanship, kids were actively and needlessly hurt—with lasting deleterious impact—because politically addicted adults didn’t want [to] admit the ‘wrong’ sort of people were right about something. Just look at the metrics on states that opened schools first versus last. If [White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s] pathetic spin were accurate, the red states would be the holdouts.
We all know that’s not true. It’s the opposite of the truth. Conservative governors were assailed for ‘killing’ children as they made the right call, as Democrat-funded teachers’ unions blasted school re-openings as white supremacy, and other such insulting nonsense. They cannot run away from their policies, and they cannot run away from their words.
Related: When the masks come off in blue states. “As he walked away, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen a single mask or Covid-crazed person of any sort at the Vermont State Fair. Yet here in New York, the cosmopolitan capital of the United States, there are still people who act like they stepped out of Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. This comes after the CDC announced its general amnesty: masks don’t work; never did; never mind all that social distancing. We were wrong, said the insufficiently contrite CDC, after having plunged the economy into an unnecessary shutdown, obliterated education for more than a year, and instilled terror into the hearts of millions of Americans incapable of reading statistics or independently assessing medical information.”
In February, the artist formerly known as Allahpundit wrote, “Having spent two years convincing themselves that maximum COVID precautions at all times is the ne plus ultra of civic virtue, Democrats will now have to somehow accept that abandoning that view doesn’t amount to sinking into right-wing vice. Essentially, they’ll need to be deprogrammed. Biden and his party’s establishment have less than nine months to do it.”
Good luck, apparently, deprogramming the mass formation psychosis that thinks of itself as Fun City.
MATT MARGOLIS: 9/11 and Biden’s Destruction of America’s Soul. “America no longer stands united. We are two different countries repeatedly proving we can’t coexist peacefully.”
IMPROVE YOUR GRIP STRENGTH: Logest Metal Hand Grip Set. #CommissionEarned
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Polio declared a disaster emergency in New York after more poliovirus found.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE:
● Shot: Biden Demeans MAGA Voters in Vile Labor Day Speech, Including Recycled Lies About January 6.
—Legal Insurrection, Tuesday.
● Chaser: Call for unity. Biden says Americans have ‘duty’ to stand up for democracy at 9/11 Pentagon ceremony.
—The New York Post, today.
Dammit, who typed a question mark on the teleprompter? How many times do I have to tell you — anything you type, Ron Burgundy will read!
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Pulsed electromagnetic field application technique for preventing bone loss due to radiotherapy.
SWISS SOCIAL MEDIA ABUZZ OVER ‘RAT OUT YOUR NEIGHBOR’ ENERGY USE POSTERS:
As Switzerland takes drastic measures to reduce its gas use this winter – including fines and up to three years in prison for citizens who violate new regulations, a viral poster circulating on Swiss social media telling citizens to rat out neighbors heating their homes above 19C (66.2F) has raised eyebrows.
“Does the neighbor heat the apartment to over 19 degrees? Please inform us,” reads the poster currently circulating on messaging services such as Signal and Telegram, according to Swiss media.
Except, it’s fake.
But accurate, as the New York Times would say:
And while the poster above may be fake, a DEF spokesperson told Blick that “if the infringement was reported and checked and could then be proven,” they may take action against violators.
Precisely, checks are not excluded, especially if one is denounced by a disgruntled neighbor or a neighborhood vigilante who is a little too zealous. In these cases, whoever heats up to 20 degrees instead of 19 can expect a fine. -Blick
“If a complaint is filed in this direction, the police must act,” added the director of the Swiss police.
1984 — a warning for the rest of us; a how-to guide for the left.
FIRST, DO NO HARM: Harris talks with space station astronauts, introduces new initiatives. “Harris talked about the importance of protecting Earth and joining forces to meet other space initiatives.”
KENYAN TV IS UNDEFEATED:
