CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Georgia Senate Passes Constitutional Carry Bill, Governor Kemp Promises to Sign It.
Archive for 2022
April 2, 2022
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: She’s on a roll: Kamala’s latest rambling two-minute non-answer is … something.
Related: Kamala Harris’ Staff Descends Into Delusion After Disastrous Interviews.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to manage the iPhone camera’s AI effects your way. “You can easily bypass those features by using a third-party app such as Halide or Camera+, which can shoot using manual controls and save the images in JPEG or raw format. Some of the apps’ features can take advantage of the iPhone’s native image processing, but you’re not required to use them. The only manual control not available is aperture because each compact iPhone lens has a fixed aperture value. That fixed aperture is also why the iPhone includes Portrait Mode, which detects the subject and artificially blurs the background to simulate the soft background depth of field effect created by shooting with a bright lens at f/1.8 or wider. The small optics can’t replicate it, so Apple (and other smartphone developers) turned to software to create the effect.”
A conversation between MSNBC’s Chuck Todd and Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., quickly became heated when Cramer claimed the media would have treated the Hunter Biden laptop story differently if he was one of former President Donald Trump’s children.
* * * * * * * *
“Here’s the reality,” Cramer began. “If Hunter Biden’s name was Donald Trump Jr. or Eric Trump you guys would be treating the war in Ukraine like—
“Don’t what-about … Enough of this,” Todd interjected, waving his hand. “”That is the laziest attack. It is not about the media. It doesn’t matter about the media.”
“It’s also honest,” Cramer said as the two continued to speak over each other.
Just think of Todd as a former and current Democratic Party operative with a byline, and it all makes sense.
SHE’S AN URBAN LEFTY DEMOCRAT, THAT’S WHAT THEY DO: Howie Carr: Michelle Wu, you’re making Boston a dumpster fire!
Is it officially against the law to criticize Mayor Michelle Wu yet?
Maybe not, but I’m sure City Hall is working on it. Because … diversity, or something.
So now the Boston City Council has by a 9-4 vote basically shooed away the early-morning protesters from her home in Roslindale.
Granted, these demonstrations — I’m surprised the alt-left media aren’t calling them insurrections — must be frustrating if you’re one of her neighbors.
But in the past, there have been much more exasperating demonstrations by Michelle Wu’s card-carrying fellow travelers, and no punishment has ever been meted out to any of the wokesters.
In 2019, then-City Councilor Wu was in the mob of layabouts who blocked the Congress Street bridge for global whatever.
And did anything ever happen to the thugs who vandalized the homes of eight Boston city councilors in 2020 after the pols were found to be insufficiently committed to defunding the police?
What about that crew of trust-funded hippies who shut down the Expressway in 2015 both in Somerville and Milton during rush hour? Ambulances were prevented from taking patients into hospitals but nothing happened to those pampered puke perps either.
Remember the antifa riots outside City Hall in the summer of 2019? The goateed soi bois with their little pot bellies and their butch black fannie packs couldn’t be identified because they were wearing masks. So a city councilor filed an ordinance to prohibit the use of masks while hurling frozen bottles of urine at the BPD during a riot.
That was voted down because … First Amendment, dude!
And of course the most memorable moment of recent Boston protest — the post-George Floyd orgy of looting and arson that engulfed the Back Bay in 2020, highlighted by the torching of a BPD patrol car and a thug on Tremont Street firing 12 rounds at the cops, some of which went through the windows of occupied apartments.
Gov. Charlie Baker, the next day, described that rampant violence, and the millions of dollars in damages as … mostly peaceful protests.
But protesting outside Mayor Wu’s house? Now that’s some really bad stuff. Call the FBI!
Approved grievance groups working hand-in-glove with the establishment operate under different rules than those actually confronting the establishment.
Plus:
My favorite comment, though, was another one from Richard, including a photo of one of Mayor Wu’s biggest supporters, Monica Cannon-Grant, who until very recently had the Boston franchise for the Black Lives Matter racket.
Monica and her husband were indicted two weeks ago by a federal grand jury on charges of wire fraud, mail fraud, welfare fraud, all the traditional poverty grifts.
“Racist @MayorWU when are we going to get comments on the arrest of your friend on 18 federal charges?”
When the phone don’t ring, Richard, you’ll know it’s the mayor commenting on Monica Cannon-Grant.
Heh.
IS THIS A CHANGE IN FREQUENCY, OR IN DIAGNOSIS? Half of older adults now die with a dementia diagnosis, up sharply from two decades ago.
Obligatory and evergreen:
Arians, who had called his allegedly strained relationship with Brady “bulls***,” up and decided it’s the perfect time for him to step aside and hand the reins to defensive coordinator Todd Bowles.
A sudden change by Arians that supposedly occurred because of Brady’s unretirement, but in a way that is 180 degrees counter to anything previously reported. According to Arians, he’s stepping aside now because he wanted Bowles to coach a team with Brady at the helm — not because Brady wanted to play for a team that didn’t include Arians in the head coaching seat. And Brady supposedly unretired without having any issue with this. Despite all his respect and admiration for Arians, he’s also totally cool if the guy isn’t around on the coaching staff in 2022.
Sure. That makes total sense. There’s nothing wonky about this storyline at all. Nor the fact that it all seemed to come together after Brady met with Buccaneers ownership in London prior to his unretirement.
Lest anyone forget, this change also comes with Arians being put into the team’s ring of honor and “elevating” him to a still-undefined position in the franchise’s administrative layer. And while he’s in that position, a source tells Yahoo Sports that he will earn the same money written into the contract extension he signed only nine months ago. It’s a great payday for those who can just step aside into it.
By the way, this is the same Arians who said in January he was definitely coaching in 2022 and told NFL Network that same month, “I’m coaching until I can’t.” Also the very same Arians who spoke defiantly at the NFL scouting combine in early March about not letting Brady play anywhere else and sounded like he was all-in on next season — even to the point of starting to vet his next suite of quarterback options.
I can’t recall a previous era when a player could dictate who he wanted — or at least didn’t want as his head coach. Perhaps the closest equivalent was John Elway refusing to play for the Baltimore Colts before entering the 1983 NFL draft.
GOODER AND HARDER: Bay Area poll finds fear of crime is a deterrent to people returning to downtown.
If you’ve tried to search for a recipe or product review recently, I don’t need to tell you that Google search results have gone to shit. You would have already noticed that the first few non-ad results are SEO optimized sites filled with affiliate links and ads.
Google still gives decent results for many other categories, especially when it comes to factual information. You might think that Google results are pretty good for you, and you have no idea what I’m talking about.
What you don’t realize is that you’ve been self-censoring yourself from searching most of the things you would have wanted to search. You already know subconsciously that Google isn’t going to return a good result.
I’m far from the only one who thinks Google is dying:
Read the whole thing. (Via Virginia Postrel.)
GROW YOUR OWN HERBS: FOYUEE Raised Planter Box with Legs Outdoor Elevated Garden Bed. #CommissionEarned
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Brace yourselves: It looks like the great college exodus may have finally begun! “Colleges across America face a daunting challenge: Their student head count has shrunk more than 5% since 2019, according to a national estimate, as debate over the value of higher education intensified during the public health crisis and economic tumult. That’s an enrollment loss of nearly 1 million students. Some drifted out of college, while others never started. Many colleges are on an urgent quest to keep current students and recover their lost freshmen.”
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Public Schools Are Cesspools of Debauchery. Get Your Kids Out Now, Before It’s Too Late.
ROGER SIMON: Self-Destructive Disney Finds a New (More Permanent) Way to Terrify Children.
Remember the Evil Queen in Disney’s animated classic “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937)? “Mirror, mirror, on the wall…” and all that. She was pretty scary.
But not nearly as scary as what Disney is doing today.
It’s hard to conceive how twisted and immoral Disney Studios—where I once worked on two feature films—has become, but I will let the estimable Chris Rufo of City Journal explain what went on at one of the company’s meetings, dubbed the “Reimagine Tomorrow Conversation Series.”
“In a featured presentation at the meeting, executive producer Latoya Raveneau laid out Disney’s ideology in blunt terms. She said her team was implementing a ‘not-at-all-secret gay agenda’ and regularly ‘adding queerness’ to children’s programming. Another speaker, production coordinator Allen Martsch, said his team has created a ‘tracker’ to ensure that they are creating enough “canonical trans characters, canonical asexual characters, [and] canonical bisexual characters.’ Corporate president Karey Burke said she supported having ‘many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories’ and reaffirmed the company’s pledge to make at least 50 percent of its on-screen characters sexual and racial minorities.”
Oh, good. And lest you think the theme parks will be spared, such fogeyish, discriminatory terms as “ladies,” “gentlemen,” “boys,” and “girls” are to be eliminated in favor of making family excursions to Anaheim and Orlando “magical and memorable for everyone,” evidently including 4-year-old transexuals.
One can imagine—“reimagine tomorrow,” in their parlance— that the nightly procession of Mickey, Minnie, and Goofy, et al., that traditionally ended an evening at Disneyland will now resemble the annual Gay Pride Parade in West Hollywood or even the Fulton Street Fair that is the highlight of San Francisco’s “Leather Pride Week.”
What’s going on here—other than the destruction of Western civilization as we knew it, leavened by a rather significant dollop of sickening child abuse?
Well, part of it is evidently rage at Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s new Parental Rights in Education Bill that is called the “Anti-Gay Bill” by the braindead choir in the mainstream media (I even saw it in a supposedly neutral AP headline), although the words “gay” or “homosexual” aren’t mentioned even once in the bill whose obvious intention is that children only learn about sexuality of any kind in an age-appropriate manner.
We might add that while this is going on, education in our country, in general, is execrable. Our kids may be being force-fed some “woke” version of sexuality but they sure aren’t learning much about reading and math.
Schools everywhere are giving up on the SATs. They might as well. The tests were already dumbed down and readjusted significantly about 20 years ago, when the average score, meant to be 500, had fallen into the low-400s.
As for Disney, it’s important to remember this isn’t just a one-off collection of wokeys enjoying their minimal power at a secret meeting (whose contents are only known because of a leak, obviously for fear it will be found out and people will stop attending their offerings).
The Walt Disney Co. is, next to Comcast, the biggest entertainment and communications company in the entire world. They own not only Walt Disney Studios, but also Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar, Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Studios, 20th Century Animation, and Searchlight Pictures.
Related: War! DeSantis Suggests Ending Disney’s Special Self-Governing Status.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Catholic university speaker: ‘crucify whiteness,’ embrace ‘hopelessness,’ ‘ethically lie.’
WORD GAMES AT NIH: A spokesman for the agency admits NIH ‘suppressed’ genetic sequencing information on COVID-19 it got from China’s Wuhan lab, but disputes Empower Oversight’s ‘Deleted’ Label. Up is down. Night is day. Black is white. Nothing to see here, move along.
DISPATCHES FROM GROUND ZERO OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Appeals Court Upholds Gibson’s Bakery Massive Verdict Against Oberlin College.
FREE SPEECH IS ONLY FOR MEMBERS OF APPROVED GRIEVANCE GROUPS WORKING HAND-IN-GLOVE WITH THE ESTABLISHMENT: Five protesters cited at Michelle Wu’s home under new Boston law. “Police are citing at least five protesters who demonstrated outside Mayor Michelle Wu’s house on Friday, the first day when new rules came into effect. According to police reports, the group of six to eight protesters who often show up to heckle Wu as she leaves home did so — and then police warned them all at 7:30 a.m. that they were breaking the new law.”
You might think this law is reasonable on its face, but it didn’t appear until lefty politicians were getting targeted.