Archive for 2023

CHRIS QUEEN: The Dehumanizers. “Marxism puts government in charge of everything and lets government decide who lives and who dies… This is why the culture of death is so pervasive among many women, Millennials, and Gen Zers. There is no humanity in Marxism.”

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Air cargo’s anemic peak season nothing to celebrate. “Moderate strengthening of demand since August has buoyed the sagging air cargo market, but the seasonal surge in retail shipments for the holidays appears to be a third the normal level and more industry players are resetting expectations for a real recovery until the fall of 2024, or later.”

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: Where are the celebrities posting for Israel? The stories of kidnapped Israelis are at least as appalling as the Boko Haram case in 2014:

One of the older hostages is Yaffa Adar, an eighty-five-year-old grandmother who cannot make it to the bathroom on her own. She was stolen from her bed by Hamas and driven on a golf cart by a group of Hamas terrorists. Footage of the abduction shows the sheer elation of these young men in their great military success at abducting a sickly, elderly grandmother. Her granddaughter spoke to me this week about the horror of thinking about her grandmother under Gaza without the basic medicines she needs to survive.

The families of the hostages of Israel have come together around a building in Tel Aviv which has been donated to them so that they have a place to meet and cry and wait. In Israel, the “Bring Them Home Now” movement is everywhere. The photos of the kidnap victims even loom over the deliberations of Israel’s Knesset.

Here is my question. Where is the international campaign? Where are the actresses? Where are the prominent influencers who aren’t Jewish? There have been posters put up outside Israel, but from London to New York these are more famous for being ripped down than for being displayed. So I repeat, where is the campaign? And why has it not caught on?

Hey wait — here’s some celebrities a celebrity responding to Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel: Actress Julianna Margulies Calls Out Her Non-Jewish Friends for Their ‘Silence on Antisemitism.’

Margulies claimed that her friends remained silent* because they simply didn’t know any better. “You mean no harm, you simply don’t have the full picture,” she wrote.

She also described the surge in antisemitism as a “teaching moment.”

The actress ignored the fact that anti-Zionism has become an article of faith for the left, especially for young progressives who view Hamas terrorists sympathetically as an oppressed group and Israelis as their oppressors.

Social media has exacerbated the issue, with China-controlled TikTok serving as the platform of choice for Zoomers to express their dangerous antisemitic views, which have recently come to include an admiration for Osama bin Laden.

* Of course, some celebrities didn’t remain silent; they actively went pro-terrorist instead: Muslim Reformer Blasts Susan Sarandon For Saying Frightened Jews Are ‘Getting A Taste’ Of What Muslims Feel.

UPDATE: Report: Susan Sarandon dumped by Hollywood agency UTA over anti-Jewish rant.

(Updated and bumped.)

OPEN THREAD: Go for it.

THE PRESS CAN’T REPORT ON THEM BECAUSE IT DISTORTS THE RACIAL / THIRD-VS-FIRST WORLD NARRATIVE:

HMM:

MADE IN CHINA: Nothing’s iMessage app was a security catastrophe, taken down in 24 hours.

It turns out companies that stonewall the media’s security questions actually aren’t good at security. Last Tuesday, Nothing Chats—a chat app from Android manufacturer “Nothing” and upstart app company Sunbird—brazenly claimed to be able to hack into Apple’s iMessage protocol and give Android users blue bubbles. We immediately flagged Sunbird as a company that had been making empty promises for almost a year and seemed negligent about security. The app launched Friday anyway and was immediately ripped to shreds by the Internet for many security issues. It didn’t last 24 hours; Nothing pulled the app from the Play Store Saturday morning. The Sunbird app, which Nothing Chat is just a reskin of, has also been put “on pause.”

The initial sales pitch for this app—that it would log you into iMessage on Android if you handed over your Apple username and password—was a huge security red flag that meant Sunbird would need an ultra-secure infrastructure to avoid disaster. Instead, the app turned out to be about as unsecure as we expected.

How bad are the security issues? Both 9to5Google and Text.com (which is owned by Automattic, the company behind WordPress) uncovered shockingly bad security practices. Not only was the app not end-to-end encrypted, as claimed numerous times by Nothing and Sunbird, but Sunbird actually logged and stored messages in plain text on both the error reporting software Sentry and in a Firebase store. Authentication tokens were sent over unencrypted HTTP so this token could be intercepted and used to read your messages.

Feature, not a bug.

MARK JUDGE: China’s Cultural Revolution: The horror Western elites want to forget.

In my view, Western elites want to forget the Cultural Revolution because the horror that happened in China 50 years ago is too similar to what liberalism is now attempting in the West.

The Cultural Revolution, which took place roughly from 1966 to 1976, was one of the bloodiest and most insane periods in the history of communism. It was an attempt to try and purge Communist China of all Western ideas, from Christianity to capitalism. An estimated 2 million were killed, and 30 million were hounded and punished.

The Left, of course, refuses to accept the similarity between China’s rejection of Western civilization and its own hatred of its ideals. Branigan herself, despite writing a book on the Cultural Revolution, claims that “to draw a line from left-wing students in the West to [Communist] Red Guards, as some have done — is not only silly but offensive.”

It’s actually spot-on accurate. After the failure of Mao’s economic Great Leap Forward, a program of collectivization that resulted in tens of millions of deaths, Mao saw the Cultural Revolution as a way to turn things around: “Our objective is to struggle against and crush those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road … so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.”

Read the whole thing.