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Archive for 2022
November 20, 2022
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Babylon Bee Writers Struggling To Think Of Joke Worth $44 Billion.
UNIVERSITY SURRENDERS TO BIGOTRY: Painting of old white men smoking cigars taken down after female scholar complains.
JOHN NOLTE: Only Harvey Weinstein Could’ve Saved She Said from Bombing.
Let me be clear: I have always thought Harvey Weinstein was a scumbag. And now he’s a convicted rapist where he belongs… Dying in prison and disgrace. So bear with me here…
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Then there’s 1) the fact the trailer gives away the whole movie, 2) the movie feels like homework and nothing close to a cinematic experience, and 3) the whole thing comes off as a poorly-shot, washed-out TV movie.
Finally, according to reviewers I trust, She Said is the opposite of an exposé. It’s actually a whitewash. Oh, sure, Harvey takes a well-deserved beating, but the countless number of elite media and Hollywood types who knew this was going on and said nothing get a total pass. The left-wing institutions of journalism and entertainment must be protected!
Oh, I know She Said is a very-very-very-very-very important movie about a very-very-very-very-very subject we have all been battered with for five very-very-very-very-very long years, but you can’t make us pay to go and see it.
The other thing is this bitter irony…
Want to know who could have turned She Said into a $100 million movie?
Harvey Weinstein.
Sorry.
That was Weinstein’s genius.
He knew how to drive an adult, agenda-driven movie to big box office and Oscar glory.
As I wrote in 2017 when the Weinstein story first broke wide-open, “by the 1990s, Hollywood product meant two things: mindless ‘blowed up real good’ CGI summer action movies and the Oscar-bait Weinstein specialized in. The latter are beautifully photographed movies cast with beautiful women — who no doubt did, witnessed, or at the very least heard stories of unspeakable things with Harvey to land their roles. And in many cases, these films are a clear insight into Harvey’s abhorrent worldview. He was the sheriff of that lawless town indeed.”
NORTH CAROLINA A&T CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH: Conservative activists issued 2-year ban from public campus.
BEN CARSON: Asian Americans and the racist lies of the left.
Attacks on Asian Americans have exploded since 2020. One in six Asian Americans reported experiencing a hate crime just last year, and anti-Asian hate crime has increased a stunning 339%, particularly in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, all of which surpassed their record numbers. This has received little attention from most of the media, despite a clear case of victimization based on race. But anti-Asian discrimination isn’t just happening in the streets — it is practiced by our publicly funded institutions and enshrined into law, too.
Despite the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition on discrimination on the basis of race, the Supreme Court has held that colleges and universities are allowed to consider race as a factor in college admissions. This amounts to nothing less than state-sanctioned discrimination against Asian Americans — and to a lesser degree, whites — all because of the color of their skin. As a result, Asian and white Americans consistently must work harder and perform better than their counterparts just to be afforded the same educational opportunities. For example, research indicates that Asian Americans have to score about 140 points higher than white students, 270 points higher than Hispanic students, and 450 points higher than African American students just to have an equal chance at gaining admission to Harvard University.
Yep. Flashback: Asians Get the Ivy League’s Jewish Treatment.
TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE! Howie Carr: Happy birthday, Biden! You’re making 80 the new 150.
On every subject, confusion abounds, and it’s only getting worse.
On the campaign trail, he forgot the name of the governor of New Mexico. (She does have three names). He lauded Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, then seconds later couldn’t recall his name and instead described Wyden as “that other guy that I just talked about.”
He talked about his visit to Florida in the aftermath of “Hurricane Ivan.”
He wished a speedy recovery to Nancy Pelosi’s husband “Bobby.” (His name is Paul.)
At age 80, Biden is unable to read the simplest words off the Teleprompter. The word “ban” comes out as “blan.” He tries to urge people to vote, but instead says “veto.” Inflation is rendered as “implation.” The Obergefell decision by the Supreme Court (gay marriage) comes out as “Ogilfry.”
He called Intel “Inkel,” and recalled meeting with “the Chee-E-O.”
Likewise, he recounted a sit-down with the chairman of GM, “Amy Barrett.” No, Mr. President, that’s the Supreme Court justice. You met with Mary Barra, but at least whatever-her-name-is had some good news for the American people and their motor vehicles.
“We’re gonna go all electric by 3035.”
Not 2035, but 3035.
And when 3035 arrives, this is how the George Jetson vehicles are going to be powered — “electric charging stations all across America the power to fleet to to take care of the fleets of new electric vehicles… 50, excuse me, 500,000 charging stations around the country.”
However, the Gray Lady just can’t see any problems with Sundown Joe: NY Times: Age is more than just a number and Biden may be a super-ager. “Joe Biden is already the oldest any person has ever been as president. And sure, on its own that’s not enough to say anything about him. But there are clear signs that he’s having memory problems, gait problems, problems putting sentences together, problems keeping his stories straight, problems keeping his accomplishments straight, etc. All of it suggests there might be a problem here, but I think the story above makes it pretty clear the Times isn’t interested in exploring that story beyond a few upbeat quotes, at least not right now.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Beating Back Left-Wing Extremists Abusing the U.S. Tax Code: How to Challenge Tax-Exempt Left-Wing Extremist Groups.
Many lawyers in the nonprofit space were no doubt alarmed by a recent episode involving a Soros-funded, anti-“disinformation” group. The group, the Good Information Foundation, was caught asking popular TikTok personality Preston Moore to make a video attacking “Trump Republicans” intended for this campaign season.
Recovered emails show the Foundation’s Board Chair Rick Stengel pushing for the video to contain certain key “messaging notes”, including that the “violence on January 6 was actually planned and paid for by Trump Republicans”; that J/6 had “broad involvement” from members of Congress, and that “there is an ongoing threat of political violence or MAGA Republicans trying to overturn elections.”
In the emails, Stengel explicitly says the intention of the video was to “channel all of this on to the manipulation of voter agencies” and to “make people more likely to vote in the midterms.”
(I asked the group if Stengel was forced to resign after no longer seeing his name on their site but never received a reply.)
That an anti-“disinformation” group is actually working to spread, not counter, disinformation is troubling enough. More troubling still is that the group was recently given tax-exempt 501(c)(3) status by the IRS. This designation is supposed to be conditioned on, among other things, the recipient working in the “public interest” and staying out of “political activity” and “campaign interventions.”
While an IRS complaint has been filed against the Foundation, it is rare for conservatives to engage with the agency’s nonprofit enforcement section when it comes to unlawful activity from extremist nonprofits. It really should not be. From the scandals involving ACORN’s nonprofit network to the recent lawsuit against the Black Lives Matter movement—as well as groups on the extreme right—, these sorts of violations are not uncommon. And there are plenty of targets among the left. As progressive writer David Callahan admits in his book The Givers, however, the nonprofit world that supports socialist and Marxist policies towers above its conservative counterpart, in terms of group numbers and advocacy dollars.
Meanwhile, it is remarkably easy to file these sorts of complaints. The IRS form is an email-able one-pager and anyone can submit them. And with social media, it’s easier than ever to catch groups violating their status.
Two violations stand-out for conservatives to take advantage of. The first, as mentioned, is for “political activity/campaign interventions.” This includes not only a nonprofit making campaign contributions, but also merely endorsing (or trashing) a candidate over social media.
It also simply includes a nonprofit comparing its position on a particular issue with that of a candidate during an election or combining voter drives with partisan messaging. Despite such simple violations potentially leading to a penalty or loss of tax-free status, it is not hard to find groups committing them on social media.
Even so, such complaints are rare.
Even though they’re easy to file. Sounds like it could be an enjoyable hobby for some people. Much more at the link.
THIS IS THE END, MY ONLY FRIEND, THE END: Left-wing Twitter goes full Apocalypse Now.
In the film Apocalypse Now, Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard comes upon a remote outpost defending a bridge. Hoping to confer with the commander, he instead finds a delirious state of chaos. A machine gunner fires heavy caliber rounds into the night while trading taunts with an unseen member of the Viet Cong.
“Who’s the commanding officer here?” Willard asks. “Ain’t you?” returns the bewildered gunner. After being awakened by his compatriots, “The Roach,” an apparently stoned soldier with a tiger-striped grenade launcher, advises that the VC is close. He propels a grenade off into the distance and the taunts of the enemy are silenced. “Hey, soldier. Do you know who’s in command here?” asks Willard. “Yeah,” answers the Roach before walking away.
That scene typifies the vibe right now on Twitter, in the best possible way.
Following Twitter’s purchase by Elon Musk, there is a sense that anything can happen — and that it just might. On Thursday, the rumor was going around that it might be Twitter’s last day. Musk issued an ultimatum to Twitter’s apparently entitled staff — at least one worker was surprised to be let go for publicly insulting Musk — that the work going forward would be “hardcore.” Those who desired to stay would need to affirmatively respond to Musk’s email. When few employees took him up on the offer, Musk had everyone locked out of the building. This, along with a mass wave of resignations, contributed to the perception that Twitter lacked critical engineers in nearly every area of operation and could soon be gone. I exchanged half-joking goodbyes with some of my Twitter pals.
But when Friday morning came, Twitter was still there. “Really glad I didn’t freak out last night and post this one terrific picture I have of my boobs,” cracked one user I am friendly with. Another friend posted that if Twitter is nearing its end, at least we spent its final hours making fun of sanctimonious liberals.
Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, a thread collated by the Thread Reader App explains what’s likely going inside Twitter: “Alright, I’m going to explain what Elon Musk is likely doing over there at Twitter. This is not a discussion on whether it’s RIGHT OR WRONG; just what’s happening. If I’m wrong, I’m sure he’ll pop up and say so. What Elon is engaged in is something called ‘Whaling and Culling.’”
COMPARE AND CONTRAST: Compare: Ohio J6 man gets three years after stealing a coat rack.
With: “Lost…in the Emotion of the Night”: Attorney Who Firebombed Police Vehicle Given 15 Month Sentence. “The Biden Justice Department later gave the two lawyers an astonishingly generous plea deal that avoided long prison sentences. Now Rahman has been sentenced to 15 months after asking for no jail time for throwing the Molotov cocktail.”
Not only are Rahman’s politics those of the gentry class, so is he:
Mattis was a member of the Corporate Group at Pryor Cashman when he was arrested. Mattis graduated from New York University School of Law in 2016 and received his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University. He was also previously employed as an associate at Holland & Knight.
Rahman had just been admitted to the New York bar in June 2019 after graduating from Fordham University School of Law. . . .
U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan praised Rahman for her commitment to fighting social injustices: “You’re a remarkable person who did a terrible thing on one night.”
The Gentry Class looks after its own, while prating about equality, the rule of law, and the dangers of “insurrection.”
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ROGER KIMBALL: Third Time’s a Charm For Merrick Garland: Would Merrick Garland have wheeled out the old special counsel wheeze absent Trump’s announcement that he was running for president again? “A man who can direct his Stasi agents to treat parents as domestic terrorists because they complain about the actions of their local school board is clearly made of strong stuff. Why not conduct an unprecedented raid on a former president’s home? Why not organize another political vendetta against him?”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: What You Need to Know about the Colossal Mess of FTX.
Every currency is maintained by a sufficiently widespread belief that the currency is currently worth something and will continue to be worth something in the foreseeable future. A currency’s value crashes when people no longer believe it is worth much, or worth anything at all.
FTX grew spectacularly fast. By March 2021, FTX had bought the rights to rename the home of the NBA’s Miami Heat as the “FTX Arena.” You may recall the Super Bowl commercial from this past February featuring Larry David, with the joke being that David didn’t understand cryptocurrency and thus was passing on investing in the next big thing — a pretty funny irony in light of recent events.
In August, Sam Bankman-Fried was on the cover of Fortune magazine, with a headline asking if he was the next Warren Buffett. He was touted like the other tech-industry boy-wonder geniuses, the next Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg — a disheveled and casual wunderkind who had apparently discovered some key business secret or truth that had eluded the rest of us.
Sam Bankman-Fried does not look like the most powerful man in crypto. Friendly and rumpled, with an unruly halo of curly hair, the 30-year-old widely known as SBF has an affinity for League of Legends, fidget spinners, and other trappings of nerd culture. But underneath the goofy facade is a trading wunderkind whose ambition knows no limits.
An MIT physics grad, SBF honed his trading skills at renowned quant shop Jane Street Capital before launching a successful firm of his own, Alameda Research. In 2019 he founded crypto exchange FTX, hailed by some as the best derivatives platform ever built.
As recently as September, FTX was believed to be worth $32 billion. In addition to running the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Bankman-Fried continued to run Alameda Research. This is like having the same person running the New York Stock Exchange and Bridgewater Associates, to pick a market and a hedge fund that are familiar to most people.
If you’re like me, you’ve felt like you didn’t really understand what the heck cryptocurrency was and didn’t bother investing in it. Well, our inability to understand these things really paid off in this case.
Heh. As for the rest: ‘Everyone’s learning crypto bankruptcy right now.’ The FTX crash is set to be a ‘gold rush’ for lawyers.
THIS IS BASICALLY THE MAINSTREAM EXCUSE FOR CENSORSHIP IN THE WEST NOW: Imagine forbidding everything that is “damage in the mind”? What would escape forbidding?
And it’s intended that nothing escape forbidding.
SALENA ZITO: Trump was always the result of the conservative populist coalition, not the cause.
Ever since former President Donald Trump lost to President Joe Biden in 2020, there has been a flag hanging from a home not far from where I live that reads “Trump 2024” — one of the thousands I have seen across the country in the past two years. But yesterday, when I drove past this home, that sign was gone.
The Trump flag is a phenomenon I have written about for years. I have noted that this wasn’t really about Trump himself — it was mostly about the conservative populist movement, using the name of its only standard-bearer to let people know they were not going anywhere. At that point, no one else had stepped up to fill the void. And so the flag bore the Trump name.
Flashback: “To understand events around the world today, one must think in terms of the class struggle.”
Much of the current tension in America and in many other democracies is in fact a product of a class struggle. It’s not the kind of class struggle that Karl Marx wrote about, with workers and peasants facing off against rapacious capitalists, but it is a case of today’s ruling class facing disaffection from its working class.
In the old Soviet Union, the Marxists assured us that once true communism was established under a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the state would wither away and everyone would be free. In fact, however, the dictatorship of the proletariat turned into a dictatorship of the party hacks, who had no interest whatsoever in seeing their positions or power wither.
Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas called these party hacks the “New Class,” noting that instead of workers and peasants against capitalists, it was now a case of workers and peasants being ruled by a managerial new class of technocrats who, while purporting to act for the benefit of the workers and peasants, somehow wound up with the lion’s share of the goodies. Workers and peasants stood in long lines for bread and shoddy household goods, while party leaders and government managers bought imported delicacies in special, secret stores. (In a famous Soviet joke, then-leader Leonid Brezhnev shows his mother his luxury apartment, his limousine, his fancy country house and his helicopter only to have her object: “But what if the communists come back?”) . . .
But the New Class isn’t limited to communist countries, really. Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.
Their first response is always to call their critics bigots
November 19, 2022
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: COVID vax makers finally study long-term heart damage as FDA admits bivalent data lacking. “More than a year after the FDA added heart inflammation warnings to COVID-19 mRNA vaccines — amid the second academic year of campus vaccine mandates on a demographic at higher risk of severe adverse events — vaccine makers are finally studying the long-term consequences of vaccine-induced myocarditis and pericarditis. . . . The CDC isn’t much further ahead in studying long-term post-vaccination harm. In late September, the agency started contacting people who meet the case definition of myocarditis and have been reported to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System. While an ‘independent entity’ should be reviewing long-term consequences, it’s ‘puzzling’ why Pfizer and Moderna waited so long to follow through on the FDA’s approval conditions, said MIT professor Retsef Levi, lead author of a study on post-vaccination ’emergency’ heart problems in 16-39 year-olds in highly vaccinated Israel.”
Are there any independent entities?
Related: COVID-19 vaccinations found to cause small, temporary changes in menstruation.
HE’S BAAACK: Elon Musk reinstates Trump’s Twitter account.
OPEN THREAD: This is your special place to hang out.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Virgin Orbit ready for historic UK launch after spaceport secures license.
HOW MUCH WILL FILTER BACK AS PAYOFFS? I FIGURE TEN PERCENT FOR THE BIG GUY: Biden agrees to pay climate REPARATIONS: US will pay up to $1BN to compensate developing countries for global warming – but gas-guzzling China WON’T have to pay into global fund.
EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: Trump To Be Reinstated On Twitter.
His account is live once again, but its last tweets are from January 8th, 2021.
DIETS DON’T WORK WITHOUT LONG-TERM CHANGES IN BEHAVIOR: Weight Loss Stats Don’t Tell The Full Story. Experts Explain Why That Matters.
THE ROAD TO WISDOM LEADS THROUGH THE PALACE OF EXCESS: Drew Barrymore defends ‘boring’ sex life: I’ve ‘done everything.’