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Archive for 2023
November 29, 2023
DEADSPIN REPORTER BLASTED BY MOM OF YOUNG KANSAS CITY CHIEFS FAN HE FALSELY SHAMED FOR WEARING ‘BLACKFACE:’ ‘He is Native American.’
The mother of a young football fan who wore a headdress and painted his face red and black to a Kansas City Chiefs game has blasted Deadspin for accusing him of “doubling up” on racism against black and Native communities — noting that her son is himself Native American.
Holden Armenta became an unexpected focus of an article by senior writer Carron Phillips that focused on a photo of the boy standing sideways, suggesting he was wearing blackface with no mention of the red side.
“The NFL needs to speak out against the Kansas City Chiefs fan in Black face, Native headdress,” read the headline, which accused the boy of “doubling up on the racism.”
Phillips, a former New York Daily News reporter, also slammed Holden’s Native American headdress and his “Tomahawk Chop” gesture, claiming the boy “found a way to hate Black people and Native Americans at the same time.”
“It takes a lot to disrespect two groups of people at once,” Phillips wrote in the article, which has since been tagged with a community note on X branding it “purposely deceiving.”
Related: “Phillips got so much backlash that he later deleted his tweet claiming that the red and black paint might be ‘even worse’ than full blackface. The now-deleted tweet read, ‘For the idiots in my mentions who are treating this as some harmless act because the other side of his face was painted red, I could make the argument it makes it even worse.’”
Yes, he could make that argument, but why in 2023 are professional sports journalists going out of their way to attack young football fans? Darkening Skies for Sports Journalism.
BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: New COVID-19 variant is spreading, poses ‘low’ public health risk.
FOR SOME, IT’S VERY SMALL, INDEED: Naked man arrested at Disneyland wandering around It’s a Small World.
A VERY PUBLIC EDUCATION: Radical Portland Teacher Reveals Why Strike Was About ‘Raw Power,’ Not the Kids.
LIVE BY TIKTOK; DIE BY TIKTOK: White House in Disarray As TikTok Turns Against Biden.
The Biden administration’s Chinese Communist Party-controlled social media birds appear to be coming home to roost. Despite concerns from Republicans and some Democrats about the way TikTok is used to influence its American users, the president and most of his party slow-walked processes and ambiguously dismissed questions about the administration’s plan to address concerns about the viral video app.
Instead of sharing any worries, the Biden White House doubled-down on its work with TikTok influencers in attempts to promote the president’s agenda among young people as Democrat campaign veterans explained the usefulness of the app amid a decline in traditional news consumption.
Then, TikTok’s youthful user base turned on Biden and now it seems there’s nothing he or his administration can do about it, other than “seriously fret.”
Noting that the “president’s popularity with young voters is already sliding because of Israel’s war against Hamas,” Fox News Channel’s Jacqui Heinrich reported Wednesday morning that “the administration is starting to seriously fret about trending terms on TikTok like ‘silent depression'” that are catching fire among young people also feeling the negative impacts of Bidenomics. “The campaign is working with content creators to try to amplify a more positive message about the economy,” Heinrich added of the president’s re-election team’s harried response.
Why support an administration which is attempting to cripple America slowly through half-measures when you can support someone whose destructive efforts achieved spectacular results immediately? Osama bin Laden’s infamous ‘Letter to America’ after 9/11 promoted by TikTok influencers, goes viral.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Donald Trump in Newsweek: I Will Make America Great Again for Young People. “Sadly, many younger Americans are putting their lives on hold because they think the Biden economy leaves them no choice. . . . Instead of helping our young people confidently begin their lives, careers, and families, Joe Biden is crushing their dreams with debt, taxes, and inflation, and paving the way for a future of anger and despair. Under Joe Biden, we are a nation in decline and rapidly losing the American Dream.”
YOU WILL BE WHATEVER THE NARRATIVE NEEDS YOU TO BE: How Elon Became an ‘Antisemite’: ‘Tristram Shandy’ is the press’s handbook for whipping words to obey a narrative.
Major papers like the Journal, New York Times and Washington Post report that advertisers are again fleeing the service previously known as Twitter because, these papers explain, owner Elon Musk endorsed “an antisemitic post.” But try confirming for yourself that the post was intelligibly antisemitic or intelligibly anything else for that matter.
The perplexing issue is the noun. A user @breakingbaht expressed a lack of sympathy for “Jewish communities” (emphasis added) that allegedly encouraged “the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them” while supporting immigration of “hordes of minorities.”
After Mr. Musk responded “You have said the actual truth,” the New York Times cited equally undefined “Jewish groups” as detecting in the original tweet a common antisemitic trope. In one Times account, the phrase “Jewish communities” was transmuted into “Jewish people.” By the end of the week, without any new information being added, the Washington Post was reporting with unqualified confidence that Mr. Musk had given his “endorsement of comments alluding to the great replacement theory—a conspiracy theory espoused by neo-Nazi demonstrators in Charlottesville in 2017 and the gunmen who killed people inside synagogues in Pittsburgh in 2018 and Poway, Calif., in 2019.”
That’s 37 words of interpolation for a six-word tweet. Mr. Musk and the original tweeter heatedly denied antisemitic intent. The Journal examined the context and suggested Mr. Musk was really exercised about a specific Jewish group, the Anti-Defamation League, which has largely adopted the identitarian and censorship agendas of the progressive left.
Related:
Professor at @RutgersU went on MSNBC and suggested Elon is antisemitic and hates Jews after he visited Israel and toured the massacre site with Netanyahu.
Joy Reid nods along. pic.twitter.com/vVccUMeOf2
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 28, 2023
Of course, we know he’s not actually an anti-semite. If he were, these people would be defending him.
IT’S ANOTHER CRISIS-BY-DESIGN IN THE MAKING: Joe Biden is tanking the US Treasury.
The Biden administration has decided to break all the rules in this regard. The Federal Reserve is trying to slow the American economy by raising interest rates, and the White House is trying to speed it up by injecting enormous amounts of fiscal expenditure through its Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). In normal times, this would be considered chaotic policy, but since the 2016 election, economists have become unwilling to criticise Democratic ministries, lest it result in another Trump presidency.
While Joe Biden’s runaway spending is leading to clear problems in the market for Treasuries, it is arguably not the worst problem. If the situation got out of control and interest rates started to spiral, the Federal Reserve could, against its better judgement, reverse its QT programme and start buying up Government debt again. This would end any pretence of central bank independence, but it would also end a debt crisis in a pinch.
Not so when it comes to foreign buyers of Treasuries heading for the exit. It is well-known that the United States runs a large trade deficit, and so needs to borrow money from abroad in very large quantities. Much of this is undertaken by issuing Treasury debt to foreign borrowers, but now they are stepping back. This begs the question: why?
It could be a simple fluctuation that will soon reverse itself: occasionally, foreign borrowers temporarily lose their appetite for Treasuries only to return to the market later. The difference today, however, is that after the American freezing of Russian foreign exchange reserves last year in response to the invasion of Ukraine, everyone has been talking about de-dollarisation. The Russian reserve seizure has shown the world that American assets are only trustworthy if Washington agrees with your foreign policy.
I warned almost two years ago that broadly sanctioning the Russian economy was unlikely to work and would likely backfire in ways we couldn’t predict — and here we are.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Treasury’s $39 billion auction of 7-year notes was poorly received, trader says. “Tuesday afternoon’s sale of 7-year Treasury notes was met with poor to lukewarm demand. The $39 billion auction was a ‘fairly ugly auction based on where things were at 1 p.m. Eastern time,’ with primary dealers taking a larger-than-usual chunk of the allocation.” (Bumped).
CLEANEST ELECTION IN HISTORY: Virginia Election Official ‘Altered Election Results’ in 2020.
THAT’S ALMOST 60 WASTED YEARS: For the First Time Since ’65, the U.S. Military Will Blast a Nuclear Reactor Into Space. “But fission can do much more than simple propulsion, and that’s why the U.S. military is forking over $33.7 million for Lockheed Martin—along with Space Nuclear Power Corp (SpaceNukes) and BWX Technologies, Inc. (BWXT)—to start designing a nuclear spacecraft as part of the Joint Emergent Technology Supplying On-Orbit Nuclear (JETSON) project.”
They really had to stretch to get the JETSON acronym but it was worth it.
HOW IT STARTED: Mayor Rahm Emanuel: ‘Chicago Always Will Be A Sanctuary City.’
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel added his voice to the chorus of big-city mayors who say theirs will remain “sanctuary cities” in response to President-elect Donald Trump’s hard-line positions on illegal immigration.
Surrounded by immigration activists, business leaders and state and federal lawmakers, Emanuel sought to reduce the fear of immigrants living in this country without authorization.
“To all those who are, after Tuesday’s election, very nervous and filled with anxiety … you are safe in Chicago, you are secure in Chicago and you are supported in Chicago,” said Emanuel at a news conference called to publicize the expansion of mental health services for people anxious over the election results.
“Chicago has in the past been a sanctuary city. … It always will be a sanctuary city,” the mayor said.
—NPR, November 14th, 2016.
How it’s going: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson Blames City’s Illegal Immigrant Crisis on ‘Right Wing Extremism’ (Video).
JOHNSON: It has to be better coordination. What we have seen is a raggedy form instituted by right-wing extremism. Everyone knows that the right-wing extremism in this country has targetted Democratically-ran cities and quite frankly, they’ve been very intentional about going after Democratically-ran cities that are led by people of color.
Their whole motivation is to create disruption and chaos because that’s what this particular party has been about. This is the same political party that did not want to accept that President Obama was actually an American. It’s the same Republican right-wing extremism that stormed the Capitol. It’s the same right-wing extremism that refuses to accept the results of the Civil War. It’s raggedy. It’s disrespectful it’s mean-spirited. It’s an unclean spirit, quite frankly.
So I got you. I got you. I just want to make sure that people understand what we’re facing. That’s why it’s so important that the faith community is leaning in at this moment. And so what what I’ve said, there has to be better coordination.
—Gateway Pundit, yesterday.
Earlier: Sanctuary Cities Seethe as Illegal Immigrants Actually Arrive.
The surest sign that public policies are simply virtue signals is when the messages don’t cost anything. The easiest way to tell when that signal starts to fail is to watch politicians flounder as the costs start to rise and voters demand relief.
It was free—and meaningless—for progressive churches to post banners calling themselves “nuclear free zones” during the Reagan era. Their dwindling congregations loved it. It was free, after George Floyd‘s murder, to post woke catechism signs on your front lawn, proclaiming “In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal” and so on. Maybe the neighbors gave you high-fives. And for years it has been free for deep-blue cities to proclaim themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants. That’s changing now that voters want some sanctuary for themselves.
Changes like this happen when voters realize the old virtue signals actually entail serious costs—and that they will have to pay them. That is exactly what’s happening in New York City and Washington D.C. now that Texas governor Greg Abbott is sending those cities a few busloads of illegal immigrants from his state.
These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott’s buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.
The ghost of Saul Alinsky smiles: “Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. ‘You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.’”
DOMINIC GREEN REVIEWS NAPOLEON:
Napoleon is a tortured love story, punctuated by six brutal battles. Or Napoleon is six tortured battles, punctuated by a brutal love story. Scott manages the rhythm of the romantic battles and military conquests with deceptive ease, merging the two in Napoleon’s image as a dictatorship merges the public and the private. French society is brutalized and desperate after the Revolution of 1789 and the mass executions of the Terror. Napoleon is brutal, a Corsican artillery officer who rises by the cannon. Joséphine de Beauharnais is desperate, a single mother whose aristocratic husband was guillotined in the Terror and who narrowly avoided the same fate.
As in Scott’s Thelma and Louise, the union of Napoleon and Joséphine is a grand alliance of the damaged and the doomed. Joaquin Phoenix specializes in awkward and inarticulate passions; recall Johnny Cash falling over his microphone or stuttering out his love for June Carter. Phoenix’s Napoleon is brooding, clumsy, and desperate. He puffs up a ladder to surprise the British garrison at Toulon in the first of his battles, fear all over his face. His sexual performance with Joséphine is comically perfunctory; it is clear she doesn’t much enjoy it. Yet once he’s on his horse, he’s firmly planted in the saddle, as though his pot belly has the weight of one of his cannon balls. Horse and rider swagger like a centaur, a mythical figure from Europe’s past and future. We see what Hegel saw when Napoleon passed him in the street at Jena. The emperor is an idea moving through history, marching to the rhythm of his mount and his inner drive.
In his interviews promoting Napoleon while it was in its ultimately stillborn pre-production phase in the late 1960s, Stanley Kubrick made its eponymous character sound like Nietzsche’s Ubermensch:
His life has been described as an epic poem of action. His sex life was worthy of Arthur Schnitzler. He was one of those rare men who move history and mold the destiny of their own times and of generations to come — in a very concrete sense, our own world is the result of Napoleon, just as the political and geographic map of postwar Europe is the result of World War Two. And, of course, there has never been a good or accurate movie about him. Also, I find that all the issues with which it concerns itself are oddly contemporary — the responsibilities and abuses of power, the dynamics of social revolution, the relationship of the individual to the state, war, militarism, etc., so this will not be just a dusty historic pageant but a film about the basic questions of our own times, as well as Napoleon’s. But even apart from those aspects of the story, the sheer drama and force of Napoleon’s life is a fantastic subject for a film biography. Forgetting everything else and just taking Napoleon’s romantic involvement with Josephine, for example, here you have one of the great obsessional passions of all time.
In contrast, as Rich Lowry asks: “Was Napoleon a dullard?” Or at least the version Ridley Scott wants his 21st century audiences to see. Exit quote: “Napoleon can be considered a proto-fascist dictator, or an enlightened reformer, or some of both, but he could never be considered dull, at least not until portrayed by a stolid Joaquin Phoenix, seemingly unaware that the general was a sparkling personality, a hugely energetic reformer and an inspiring leader of men. As the Wall Street Journal critic Kyle Smith puts it, ‘Mr. Phoenix’s Napoleon could never have commanded so much as a squadron of the Salvation Army.’”
HAVE COLLEGES FINALLY PUSHED IT TOO FAR? Rich Vedder thinks maybe they have, as does The Blogfather. With a special appearance from the late, great Milton Friedman: “Fully two decades have passed since the preeminent American libertarian economist Milton Friedman wrote to me, saying, ‘A full analysis … might lead you to conclude that higher education should be taxed to offset its negative externalities.'”
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: How About One More War on Biden’s Watch — Much Closer to Home?
YOU MEAN, WITH ELECTRICITY, ANTIBIOTICS, AND SPACE TRAVEL? ‘F*ck White People’: YAF chapter shares video of campus group speaker blaming white people for ‘where we are in our world.’
GO WOKE, START GOING BROKE, DIG IN: The Disney 10k Annual Report Reveals Disney May Be VERY Worried About Their Place in the Culture War.
I’m a “big picture” kinda guy, not a number cruncher in detail, and there’s nothing wrong with experts doing that number-crunching and we are blessed on this channel to have real experts like Valliant Renegade and Jonas J. Campbell and Mexican Ironman Mike to do that for us.
But.
Disney released their “Form 10k” as obligated to the Securities and Exchange Commission as a public corporation must do, and this, the “10k” is the annual report on all things financial about the business past, present, and potentially future. I’ve read these before on companies in and out of the “Industry” and I read this one and putting aside the detailed calculations, some things stood out to me. Here we go:
There is in such things a statement of the various “Risk factors” the company may encounter, all in the obligatory legal way to avoid people later saying “You never warned us about this!!” and most of these are pretty obvious and boilerplate. But here’s some of the Disney language—and warning, it is dense but there’s a point in showing it all to you so we can dig in and find the, well, crazy bits.
Read the whole thing.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Relentless Efforts to Derail the Trump Train Are Failing Bigly. “Despite the unceasing efforts to wear him down and destroy him, Trump keeps showing up to work. His haters aren’t getting any of the results they want. In fact, Trump’s poll numbers are on steroids now.”
21ST CENTURY TECH MEETS 7TH CENTURY BARBARISM: Fake babies, real horror: Deepfakes from the Gaza war increase fears about AI’s power to mislead.
QUESTION ASKED: When you Wish upon a star: is the Disney shine fading?
This isn’t so far from what Apple have done with Napoleon and Killers of the Flower Moon, namely using the theatrical release as a preview for what will eventually be a prestigious part of their Apple TV+ service. If the films go into profit at this point, great, but that’s hardly the sole intention. And, besides, Apple is the largest and most profitable corporation in the world. Disney, for all of its rapacious acquisition of other companies, has to make its money in a variety of ways, and people going to see their films in theaters — as well as streaming them on Disney+, or paying a fortune to go to their theme parks — is an essential part of their current business model.
Is it curtains for Disney and its increasingly embattled CEO Bob Iger, after the let-down of Wish and the utter failure of The Marvels? Probably not. There will be a can’t-miss Frozen sequel, or two, round the corner. And it’s more likely than not that fan-favorite characters like Iron Man and Black Widow will be returning in some multiverse jiggery-pokery to give the Marvel series a shot of familiarity amid the growing suspicion that audiences don’t especially care about Captain Marvel, Kang the Conqueror and the like. The Star Wars series, which has largely pivoted to streaming, will surely produce another big-budget film in the next few years, once it’s been decided who will be the guiding force behind it, and Pixar remains a force to be reckoned with, even if its glory days are behind it.
Perhaps there’s only one thing left to do with the House of the Mouse: Destroy Disney To Save It?
Reading between the lines, Disney doesn’t seem to care that their woke agenda is hurting their business. It’s our fault for wanting to protect the innocence of our children instead of exposing them to the harmful gender ideology. We don’t want kids watching Disney content if that means they’ll be asking about preferred pronouns and whether they’re really a boy or a girl. Disney may not care that its political agenda is hurting its business, but how long will Disney shareholders tolerate it?
If Disney was putting out movies audiences actually liked, they’d be in a much better position to at least attempt to wait out the storm. But they’re not. Therefore, we must keep the pressure on, not watch Disney’s woke films or go to the parks. Let’s see how Disney shareholders are willing to lose money.
And it seems to be working! At least according to America’s Newspaper of Record: Disney Awarded Defense Contract After Producing More Bombs Than Lockheed Martin.