MY MEME POSTS ARE THE REASON I’VE BEEN UPPING MY HEAT TOLERANCE; WE ALL KNOW WHERE I’M GOING TO END UP, AFTER ALL: Meme Me Awake.
Archive for 2024
June 9, 2024
OPEN THREAD: Meet me at midnight, at Mr. Chow’s.
SPACEX AND THE IMPERATIVE TO LOWER LAUNCH COSTS. One quibble: It’s true that SpaceX hasn’t yet lowered launch prices to match launch costs, but it has offered much greater availablilty, reliability, and scheduling flexibility, which is more value for the price. As for the rest of this article, it’s interesting but it’s all based on speculation.
“THEY DRAFT THE WHITE TRASH FIRST ‘ROUND HERE ANYWAY:”
Percent of Russian men, 18-49, who have participated in the 🇺🇦war
Moscow & St Petersburg have 0.2% of men having “served.”
The most impoverished & minority dense areas have the highest rate of men who were shipped-off to die.
👉 Putin will only be challenged if Moscow suffers. pic.twitter.com/HroZU56tdV
— Jason Jay Smart (@officejjsmart) June 9, 2024
FASTER, PLEASE: Game-Changing Antibiotic Discovered That Spares ‘Good’ Bacteria.
THE CITY WOULD HAVE GIVEN THEM A MEDAL FOR THAT:
Kids Arrested For Driving Scooters Over Pride Flag Wishing They Had Burned American Flag Instead https://t.co/A9YcHmkXuY pic.twitter.com/A1DtBYs40O
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) June 9, 2024
IT’S ABOUT BRINGING AMERICA DOWN, NOT RAISING UP THE PALESTINIANS: If anybody with a brain and a pulse remains who doesn’t know the “Pro-Palestinian” movement is actually all about being anti-America, they should check this out:
“The people of Palestine have called for this movement to escalate its pressure. We are here to answer that call and help this movement ESCALATE. We want this movement to break out of the confines of universities, to spread throughout society, paralyzing the economy that is driving the genocide of the Palestinian people, and has made all of us complicit in decades of colonial war.”
That quote from one of movement’s front-groups is in the fourth installment of Richard Pollock’s deep-dive into the leadership, the tactics and the ultimate aims of the radical Left leaders of the Pro-Palestinian movement. Pollock is the former New Leftist who trained legions of his comrades using Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.” He knows whereof he speaks.
EUROPE MOVES TO THE RIGHT: “The results are coming in for today’s elections for the European Parliament, and so far it appears right-leaning populist parties are routing the establishment centrist and left parties. Green Parties are taking a disproportionate share of the losses…Is this an omen for our election in November, just as the Brexit vote in 2016 foreshadowed the outcome? I know one center-left thinker who says Yes.”
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED BY ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Palestinianism Began with Nazism And Today Is Based on Antisemitism, Sexism, Homophobia and Denial of Human Rights. So Why Is the Left So in Love with It?
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Home Invasion 101: Your home is your castle. Act like it.
READER FAVORITE: DMoose Fitness Forearm Exerciser – Hand, Wrist and Forearm Strengthener. #CommissionEarned
WE’RE HEARING A LOT ALONG THESE LINES LATELY: Study: Young athletes at risk for elevated blood pressure rates, future cardiovascular complications.
THAT’S GOOD, BECAUSE THE CURRENT PRODUCT STINKS: The Brits Invade US Newsrooms With a ‘Killer Instinct’ and Fleet Street Ethics.
The crisis in American news media has led to an unexpected result in a very short time: The invasion of executive news suites by British editors, who experts say bring a “killer instinct” to news gathering, while notably downgrading the diversity quotient* in news leadership.
Most recently with the appointment of Will Lewis as the publisher and CEO of the Washington Post — and his latest restructuring plan, featuring the appointment of Fleet Street-bred editor Robert Winnett as executive editor after the election — British players are gaining a significant foothold in the U.S. media industry.
These latest U.K. natives arrive just months after a growing list of others — CNN’s CEO Mark Thompson, The Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Emma Tucker, Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait, The Daily Beast’s content chief Joanna Coles and the outlet’s new executive editor Hugh Dougherty.
“In media, everybody is floundering. As legacy media takes continual hits, everybody is looking for the magic ticket that appeals to consumers and advertisers,” said Mark Borkowski, a London-based British publicity, image and crisis consultant, told TheWrap. “It is about the perception of who is successful, and therefore doing something similar is going to lead to similar success.”
But, as UK media execs are being handed some of the biggest jobs in U.S. journalism, some question whether the choices are what America’s democracy needs. “Everybody’s screaming about how we have a crisis in local news,” said Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor at CUNY. “I say we have a crisis in national news too, at this time when fascism is at the door.
But their coverage of 2016 and 2017 and 2020 is a big part of why they’re so despised now. And their hatred of the Bad Orange Man (see also Jarvis’s f-bomb above) means there will be no apologies for going all-in on conspiracies. After the elections of 2004 and 2008, the media at least paid lip service to what they got wrong and vowed not to do it again – and of course promptly forgot those mea culpas. None are forthcoming this time around.
* Howell Raines, then of the New York Times, who said in a classic Kinsley Gaffe from 2001, their hiring campaign that brought in serial plagiarist Jayson Blair, “has made our staff better and, more importantly, more diverse,” could not be reached for comment.
UPDATE: John Nolte: Crybaby Washington Post Staffers Melt Down over Changes.
[T]he Post has lost its credibility and customers, and the parasites killing this host remain in charge.
I love it. I don’t want the Post to turn things around. Not only that, but I want to watch the Post and all of its reprehensible staffers get what they deserve: a slow, agonizing, and humiliating death.
Plus a (partial?) list of the many hoaxes the Post and other DNC-MSM outlets have run since 2016.
Back in 2003 Virginia Postrel explored “Press Pathologies:”
Each national press corps seems to have its own pathology. For the American press, it’s the giant campaign swing, as applicable in military campaigns as in electoral contests. First the front-runner can’t lose. Then he’s a total disaster. Ditto the U.S. military in Iraq. The audience, reporters seem to believe, will reward drama.
The British press corps serves its market, in turn, by passing on every rumor someone tells a reporter in a bar. The result are lots of juicy stories, some of them true. As a former U.S. news editor told her editors after 9/11, when asked why her paper wasn’t getting the great stories in the British press, “They’re great stories. But they aren’t true.”
The American media certainly arrived there by 2016! No wonder the Brits are making such headway in American newsrooms these days.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Google avoids jury trial by sending $2.3 million check to US government.
JOEL MILLER INTERVIEWS VIRGINIA POSTREL: Technology, Culture, and Power—What Connects Them All. Journalist Virginia Postrel on Spotting Trends, AI, Her Simple Advice for Young Writers, More.
In The Future and Its Enemies, which came out in 1998, I argue that many political and cultural issues are better understood not as conflicts between traditional left and right but as conflicts between advocates of dynamism and advocates of stasis.
The central value of dynamism is learning. Progress occurs not as marching toward a known goal but as a decentralized process of trial and error with feedback provided through competition and criticism. We neither start from scratch nor seek to freeze what is (or was). We build on the past by identifying flaws—“form follows failure”—and seeking to correct them. Progress is a bottom-up, incremental process. Contrary to what some people assumed because of my Reason job, dynamism isn’t synonymous with libertarianism—it’s compatible with some forms of redistribution, for instance—but it does require less regulation and more tolerance than we’re often accustomed to.
Today when I give talks on the subject, I often define dynamism as a variety of liberalism that foregrounds learning, whereas other versions foreground other values, such as justice, equality, or autonomy. Liberalism in real life, as opposed to liberalism in philosophy articles, values all these things but also constantly makes tradeoffs among them. Liberals argue among themselves about which should take precedence in a given situation.
The drive for stasis takes two basic forms. The first I call “reactionaries.” Their central value is stability. They idealize a steady-state society where things don’t change. The irony is that pursuing this ideal implies a revolutionary turn from our current liberal order, usually toward an idealized past. When I wrote the book, the best examples were often green ideologues, who have since morphed into degrowthers. Today, they’ve been joined by integralist theocrats like Patrick Deneen. Consciously or not, reactionaries oppose the open society. They are illiberal or anti-liberal.
The other stasist camp, which I call “technocrats,” emphasizes control. Technocrats often praises the idea of progress but define it as moving toward a single, known goal. When the book was new, I used to talk about Bill Clinton’s “bridge to the future” as an example of technocratic thinking. The phrase sounds inspiring, but it assumes a single route from Point A to Point B. Deviate from that predetermined path and you fall into the abyss. Technocrats may or may not have liberal allegiances. Bill Clinton does. Xi Jinping does not.
Read the whole thing.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Unexpected Hostage Rescue.
Part of me wants to know how the assault force achieved the surprise needed to forestall hostage execution in two separate locations. They had to make entry practically simultaneously at a mutually optimal moment. Since I can’t know I will guess. The rescue operation elements may have seemed to be part of the random environment until the rescue moment. The key disadvantage of holding hostages in populated areas is that Hamas cannot entirely prevent random and ambient access by the public to places nearby, access the IDF can exploit by continuously flowing assets through the vicinity. The presence of civilians cuts both ways. It provides human shielding against an assault force, but it can also conceal those same elements.
Related: Did Gazan who held Israeli hostages work for Al Jazeera and US-based charity?
QUESTION ASKED: “Is Rishi Sunak trying to lose the General Election?” Sunak’s D-Day snub has exposed his staggering aloofness:
Today, Rishi Sunak apologised for leaving Thursday’s D-Day events early. He attended a memorial event for the 80th anniversary of the landings at Ver-sur-Mer in northern France in the morning, before hopping back over to Blighty to film an interview with ITV. This meant he missed the later ceremony on Omaha beach. And so UK foreign secretary David Cameron, not prime minister Sunak, was pictured alongside US president Joe Biden, French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Olaf Schoz. This was an all-too-visible snub.
Sunak has also been forced to deny claims that he was planning to skip even the morning ceremony to stay in the UK campaigning.
I can’t believe I need to say it, but it seems that Sunak and his coterie of advisers still need to hear it: D-Day matters to the British people – a hell of a lot. It was critical to the Allied defeat of the Nazis in the Second World War. It’s about democracy’s triumph over fascism and the sacrifices that were made to achieve this. This stuff is the very basis of the modern British national identity. If Sunak himself did not realise this – damning enough in itself – you would like to think that one of his band of handsomely remunerated aides might have twigged it.
Seen on Facebook:
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AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Liam Neeson Criticized For Killing 31 Innocent Human Traffickers Just To Get Back One Hostage.
PRO-PALESTINIAN PROTESTERS SURROUND WHITE HOUSE, CLASH WITH POLICE:
Police clashed with Gaza protesters on Saturday morning as the demonstrators attempted to surround the White House in Washington DC.
As the protest ensued, officers were in the process of making an arrest of a woman and the other demonstrators around them started to follow, chanting, “Let her go!” A mob surrounded the officers in an attempt to make the arrest and could be seen pushing the policeman.
Demonstrators attempted to pull the arrested woman away from the police officers and were eventually successful in helping her to escape. During the clash with police, mace was also used by the officers to quell the mob, according to reporter Jordan Fischer.
Other protesters cheered after they set the suspect free from the police as she was being arrested.
At one point during the protest, a man wearing a Hamas headband lifted up a mask of Joe Biden with blood stains after others had defaced a monument.
One protester was seen at the demonstration holding a sign that said, “F*ck Israel. Stand with Hamas.” The man with the sign explained to an interviewer, “I support by any means necessary what Hamas can do to resist the genocide that Israel and the Jews who do it.”
Smoke bombs were also reportedly being set off in front of the White House during the protest.
This all sounds pretty insurrection-y to me. Hey, you know what that means!
The good news is those responsible will be arrested and prosecuted because I've been assured that No One is Above the Law. https://t.co/oSzfX9fYWf
— Sunny (@sunnyright) June 8, 2024
UPDATE: Charles Cooke writes, “It gets boring to play these ‘what if?’ games, but that they are boring does not mean that they aren’t necessary or true. What if the people who did this had been right-wingers? What if they’d been wearing MAGA hats?”
We all know the answers to these questions. There would have been mass arrests — and mass hysteria to go along with it. We’d have had wall-to-wall coverage in the press, an endless supply of furrowed opinion pieces in the newspapers, and the delivery of hundreds of new “expert” theories confirming the intrinsic link between right-of-center views and murderous hyperbole. As it is, I’ve had to search quite hard to find out what happened yesterday, and most of the photographs and videos I’ve seen were taken not by TV stations or newspapers but by amateurs on Twitter. There is a reason that I’ve used NBC’s report twice in this post: I couldn’t find an equivalent on the homepages of CNN, the BBC, the New York Times, or the supposedly D.C.-oriented Washington Post.
We all know why this is. And, until it changes, the Democrats’ rhetoric will continue to fall flat — even in such cases as it’s demonstrably correct.
Indeed.