Archive for 2022
November 5, 2022
INTERESTING BOOK: They’re Lying: The Media, The Left, and The Death of George Floyd. #CommissionEarned
IT WAS A MURDER: Barack Obama inadvertently explains why democracy is dying under this administration. “When he cautioned people about the threat that a Republican victory on November 8th would pose to democracy, Obama described how things are in countries without a functional democracy, a warning that I assume all of us could take to heart. But he went on to list some examples of things that happen in countries without our rights and freedoms. See if you recognize any of them.”
We are currently ruled by people who see China as a model.
THAT’S A BOLD STRATEGY FROM BIDEN GOING INTO THE MIDTERMS — AND WINTER: Paging PA Voters: Biden Brags About Ending Industry Critical for Your State. “We’re gonna be shutting these [coal] plants down all across America, and having wind and solar.”
In September of 2019, after CNN’s seven hour “climate change town hall,” Bryan Preston wrote, “Seriously, if you see all of the above — which is just a sample — and vote for any of these people for any office at any level, it’s on you. If you like Venezuela, voting for any of them will bring you a whole lot of Venezuela.”
And as Kate of Small Dead Animals wrote after the CNN horror show, “Don’t make the mistake of thinking they don’t mean it.”
Or to put it another way, as Joe’s old boss told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008: “Under my plan, energy costs will necessarily skyrocket…”
DO 48% OF COLLEGE STUDENTS REALLY THINK SPEECH MIGHT SOMETIMES MERIT THE DEATH PENALTY? A recent McLaughlin poll suggests the possibility. On a closer look, probably not. Probably…
CHIP DILLER, CALL YOUR OFFICE! Let’s check in on the Democrats right now:
—Mediaite, Thursday.
—Fox News, Friday.
● ‘We’ve Seen This Before’: CNN Guest Michael Fanone Compares GOP, Ballot Box Watchers To KKK.
—The Daily Caller, Thursday.
● The View’s Sunny Hostin: Suburban women backing GOP ‘like roaches voting for Raid.’
—The Hill, Thursday.
Classical reference in headline:
WHAT WE KNEW IN THE EARLY DAYS:
We approach the third year and people have forgotten that all the harms of lockdowns were strongly warned about by many voices in many venues. In addition, the virus was much better understood back then and openly discussed. We knew for certain that the panic and fear were being wildly overblown.
Below follows resources assembled by the ‘Robber Baron‘ and many others who write for the Brownstone Institute. These citations from newspapers, magazines, academic journals and interviews, with many respected voices, show that we certainly knew tremendous amounts in the early days. All the warnings and information were readily available to anyone paying attention.
We certainly live in an age of short attention span but many these signs and warnings came weeks or months before the world locked down and they chronicled the damage as it was happening. Why all this came to be completely ignored remains the burning question.
Or to put it another way: From Libs of TikTok on Thread Reader, a “#NoPandemicAmnesty Mega Thread. They want us to forgive and forget what they did during the pandemic. We shouldn’t.”
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1587149047634087936
DEAL OF THE DAY: LED Tactical Flashlight. #CommissionEarned
STOCK UP NOW, THEY’LL PROBABLY RAISE THEIR PRICES RIGHT AFTER THE ELECTION: Major grocery retailers roll back prices for Thanksgiving sales as Bidenflation gobbles up family budgets.
Yes, I’ve gotten that cynical.
YEAH, THAT’S A REAL POSER: “I wonder which ‘national party’ is expressing this anxiety to The Washington Post — which party relied on Twitter moderation to protect its interests in the run-up to the elections.”
Related:
Did you or any of the Twitter staff you’re speaking to ‘sound the alarm’ when the decision was taken to suppress the @nypost scoop on Hunter Biden’s laptop – to help his father win the 2020 election? https://t.co/SxkZfcUO0l
— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) November 5, 2022
ENDORSED: Break Up the FBI.
Certain parts of the FBI, especially in its top ranks, are cesspools of politicization and abusive treatment of citizens. A House Republican report highlights some of the problems, and a National Review essay proposes one significant corrective.
The Republican staff of the House Judiciary Committee released a 1,000-page report on Friday on the “politicization of the FBI and Justice Department.” While sometimes overwrought and sometimes overbroad in its claims, the report supports well its fundamental assertion that “the Federal Bureau of Investigation, under the stewardship of Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland, is broken. The problem lies not with the majority of front-line agents who serve our country, but with the FBI’s politicized bureaucracy.”
Garland and Wray have repeatedly stonewalled legitimate attempts at congressional oversight, sometimes (by this observer’s reckoning) almost criminally. In a Nov. 2 letter to Garland, ranking committee Republican Jim Jordan of Ohio listed an astonishing 32 outstanding requests for information (stemming from eight different inquiry letters from committee Republicans) that Garland or his agents have yet to fulfill. Likewise, Wray has failed to fulfill 38 informational demands from eight other letters.
Even accounting for a tendency for the minority party in Congress to make some demands for information seemingly more crafted for political “gotcha” theatre than for legitimate oversight, the recalcitrance of Garland and Wray on obviously substantive demands is an affront to the public. Instead of the transparency due in a government based on the citizenry’s consent, this behavior looks like the sort of cover-up common to authoritarian rule.
It looks like that because that’s what it is.
JIM TREACHER: Twitter Lays Off Thousands of Censors.
There was a time when I would’ve sympathized with the people getting laid off from Twitter. That time was before I joined Twitter.
I’m not going to jump up and down with joy about my former oppressors hitting the bricks, but I’m not crying into my sweater either. If somebody censors you, lies to you, lies about you, and generally treats you like a mortal enemy for disagreeing with him, are you supposed to feign concern when he’s fired?
What’s the average annual salary at Twitter? A hundred grand, thereabouts? Those folks should have enough saved up to afford San Francisco rents for another month or two.
And what happens now? Will Twitter fall apart without all those crucial employees? Can a social media platform survive without “trust & safety” hall monitors to constantly remind you what you can and can’t say?
The journos certainly aren’t taking it well. You doin’ okay there, MSNBC’s Ben Collins?
That’s all this is. These tech reporters and “disinfo” specialists just lost all their power. They were big fish in a little pond, until a South African dude with a particular taste in memes threw in a stick of dynamite. The bird app was the source of their status, but suddenly their friends there are gone and they don’t exert any control over it.
Live look at the reaction from Ben Collins’ former boss:
TALK ABOUT YOUR TRUST THERMOCLINES, WE’RE THERE: “We are at a moment in time rarely seen in politics, where the President of the United States can give a Prime Time address claiming that the very future of the Republic is at risk and the reaction is a complete shrug. Nobody cares. Nobody is listening. Biden owns the “bully pulpit,” but it is made of balsa wood and was nailed together by a 3 year old with a Playskool hammer.”
Plus: “Soon it will be our task to fight against the Republican insiders who are licking their chops at the feast they see set before them. Many of them are mirror images of the Democrat consulting class, indifferent to outcomes as long as the gravy train continues. They are as amoral as the Democrats, and we need to sweep them away as badly as this crop of Democrats.”
SCOTT WALKER’S REVENGE: Wisconsin Republicans on the Verge of Total, Veto-Proof Power. “If Wisconsin Democrats lose several low-budget state legislative contests here on Tuesday… it may not matter who wins the $114 million tossup contest for governor between Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and Tim Michels, a Republican. Those northern seats would put Republicans in reach of veto-proof supermajorities that would render a Democratic governor functionally irrelevant…. The Republican leaders in the Wisconsin Legislature say they will bring back all 146 bills Mr. Evers has vetoed during his four years in office — measures on elections, school funding, pandemic mitigation efforts, policing, abortion and the state’s gun laws — if they win a supermajority or if Mr. Michels is elected.”
Good luck, guys.
NEW FRONTIERS IN KREMLINOLOGY: Here’s How to Know What’s Really Happening on Election Night.
The above is not a rosy scenario. But if the following is happening, then the red team is having a nice night:
- Rachel Maddow is taking off her glasses and wiping her eyes a lot.
- PolitiFact is reported to be rehiring the 500 fact-checkers who were laid off after Biden won the presidency and Democrats won the Senate.
- CBS’s election panel breaks into inconsolable weeping at 11 p.m.
- Workmen are seen in the Capitol parking lot painting this on the curb in front of the Senate committee hearing room: “This Space Reserved for Secretary Mayorkas.” (Hat tip to Rep. Steve Scalise.)
- Pundits on CNN’s election-night panel are saying the phrase “a bipartisan spirit is needed in Congress now” a lot.
- Hunter Biden is seen boarding a flight to Brunei, which has no extradition treaty with the U.S.
- CBS is going to commercial breaks and coming out of commercial breaks to strains of Mozart’s Requiem.
- Pundits on all networks are repeating the line “now we’ll see if they can govern.”
Heh. Read the whole thing.
TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: Senate Dems face brutal 2024 map with at least eight undecided incumbents.
JOHN LUCAS: On Nov. 7, Americans Honor Those Killed Fighting For Us In Vietnam. “Next week I will participate in the reading of the names of the fallen who are memorialized on the Vietnam Wall. Starting on Monday, Nov. 7, and going until midnight each day, it will take three and a half days to read all 58,281 names on the wall. For those of us participating, it is part of our promise never to forget and always to honor the lives of our friends and comrades who gave their all in the service of the nation. People now forget, never knew, or choose to lie about it, but aside from family, friends, and the military, the country did not truly mourn their deaths. Neither individually nor as a group were they accorded the honor, the respect, or the sorrow — whether ersatz or real — of the sort now heaped upon drug-addled criminals killed by police. Since then, a few of those who slandered them have apologized. But very few. Others have tried to pretend that they opposed the government but ‘supported the troops’ all along. To put it politely, balderdash. We remember you. Not to remember would be to betray our comrades whose names are carved on the wall. We remember that privileged college students, faculty, the left, and much of the Democrat Party supported the killing of our soldiers. They now pretend otherwise. But in their classrooms, at their “anti-war” rallies, and on their TV networks, they lauded our enemies. They waved the flags of our enemies who were trying to kill us, and who did kill those memorialized on the wall. That flag-waving was intended to encourage our enemies in their bloody work.”
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Why suburban women are flocking to the GOP: As simple as A,B,C.
THE PROBLEM WITH CENSORSHIP IS, IT MAKES YOU STUPID: In Xi’s China, even internal reports fall prey to censorship.
Reid added that Republican messaging around the issue has made “inflation” a household word:
Appearing as a guest on Thursday’s Deadline: White House, Reid was asked by host Nicolle Wallace how the hot-button issues of crime and inflation are playing out in Florida, where Reid was doing the live hit from.
“The only people I ever hear use the word ‘inflation’ are journalists and economists,” she answered. “So, that is not part of the normal lexicon of the way people talk.”
Year-over-year inflation is at a four-decade high, with the figure hitting 8.2% in September.
So, it’s interesting that Republicans are doing something they don’t normally do, which is not use the common tongue, not use just common English like they sort of do on their campaigns like they do with crime.
But what they’ve done is they’ve taught people the word inflation. Most people who would’ve never used that word ever in their lives are using it now because they’ve been taught it, including on TV, including in newspapers. They’ve been taught this word.
Since Joy’s big on time travel, let’s set the TARDIS back to 1978:
Speaking of time travel, can we bring 1978 Biden back to 2022? He seems much more focused on issues that Americans care about than the current angry withered husk that shares the same name.
THIS IS A SOCIETY THAT EATS AND DESTROYS ITS HEROES; AND WE NEED ALL THE HEROES WE CAN GET: Big Damn Heroes.
WELL, THAT DOES SEEM TO FIT THE CDC’S PATTERN! The CDC Replaces Flawed 2016 Opioid Prescribing Guideline with a Flawed 2022 Opioid Prescribing Guideline. “Perhaps most egregiously, the rationale of the 2022 Guideline remains predicated on the flawed assumption that overprescribing opioids caused the overdose crisis. There is no correlation between prescription volume and the nonmedical use or addiction to prescription opioids. And the percentage of people aged 18 or older addicted to prescription pain pills has been unchanged at less than one percent this entire century. The CDC should follow the evidence and abandon this mistaken premise.”
HE’S BEEN AS TRANSPARENT AS BIDEN: John Fetterman insists he’s been ‘transparent’ about health in ‘cakewalk’ ‘View’ interview.
Yes, that is a funny way to spell “demented.” Hey, Pennsylvanians, do you love Biden? If you do, do vote for his fellow zombie.
ENOUGH! Demonization and Segregation.
I KNOW THOUSANDS OF SCIENCE FICTION FANS WHO’VE BEEN GAMING THIS OUT OVER THE LAST SEVERAL DECADES: Earth is ‘unprepared’ for alien contact, extraterrestrial experts warn.
After the virtuoso performance of experts during the last two years, I’ll take the geeks and reenactors, the Klingon language institute, the Star Trek and Star War LARPERS and even the inevitable Ensign and Storm trooper making out in the darkened back staircase of any given Science Fiction con (in defiance of their clan and fandom) over any dozen of experts, and call it superior.
My people are many things: misfits, odds, goats, strangely obsessive about things the rest of the world doesn’t value, and sometimes, just sometimes, a little bit lost. But some infiltrators trying to civilize us not withstanding, none of us — not one of us — nor even a dozen of us could have managed to create the cock up and human misery that the “experts” effortlessly produced in the last two and a half years. If the aliens land, bring them to us. We’ll handle it. We’ve been treated as aliens ourselves, most of our lives.