Archive for 2024
September 4, 2024
NO. NEXT QUESTION? Should we regulate the moon? Scientists call for international plan to share lunar water and resources. That’s not really what the rather interesting article is about, though. Bad headline.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD WITH NEWS YOU CAN USE: 9 Signs You Were The Bad Guy In World War II.
CHOOSE YOUR ADVENTURE:
● Top pollster finds Trump gains momentum against Harris – 58% chance of winning 2024 race.
—The New York Post, today.
● Kamala Harris will win US election, Telegraph poll predicts.
—The London Telegraph, yesterday.
● Trump’s campaign in chaos amid infighting among ‘grifters,’ ‘hucksters’ and ‘profiteers’ on his team.
—The London Daily Mail today.
—Also the London Daily Mail, also today.
SPRINGTIME FOR TUCKER: The Tablet’s Park MacDougald gives the background on Tucker’s interview with “historian” Darryl Cooper (the basics of which you’ve already read in the Mediaite story I linked to yesterday, and Steve’s piece at the PJ Mothership this morning) and writes, “A newsletter is not the place to ‘debate’ a podcaster over the most written-about subject in human history. Instead, we think it’s better to think about this episode from a political perspective:”
Who benefits from putting a World War II revisionist on the most popular podcast in America two months before an election? Well, for one, Carlson himself. One way to understand the interview is as a play by Carlson to draw a line on the right, with himself and the other brave “truth-tellers” (like Candace Owens) on one side, and the “neocons,” “Zionists,” and other establishment hysterics on the other. Sure, it shrinks the conservative coalition, provokes pointless infighting, and gives ammunition to Democrats and various sub-Lincoln Project grifters who would love nothing more than to distract from nearly a year of donor-funded, pro-terror protests on the left by portraying Donald Trump supporters as a gang of Nazi apologists. But it also puts Trump on the spot: Will you denounce your loyal followers to please liberals and “Conservative, Inc.” talking heads who hate you? Either way, Carlson wins.
Carlson wins, that is, and Trump loses*. As Abigail Shrier observes on X:
Kamala benefits….as does Barack Obama. This is trivially true in the sense that two-party politics are inherently zero-sum, but consider also the specifics of Cooper and Carlson’s discussion of Churchill. The implication isn’t merely that, say, Churchill was an overrated leader or a bad diplomat. Rather, it’s that Churchill was pushed by “Zionist” financiers to drag the United States into a war that it had no business fighting (never mind that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was preparing for a war with Germany from the late-1930s on). Those Zionists, always trying to drag naive Americans off to war!
Of course, it’s easy to say this story evokes antisemitic tropes. But what in present-day American politics is it supposed to remind you of?
For help with that one, we can turn to Iranian agent, Obama ally, and Iran-deal salesman Trita Parsi, who felt that yesterday was an excellent time to turn the subtext into text by sharing a clip from Carlson’s previous interview, with Jeffrey Sachs:
Read the whole thing.
Related: We Need to Talk about Tucker, Again.
Carlson also spoke in a prime-time slot at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He will be touring his show this month throughout the nation, with scheduled guest appearances in different cities by Vivek Ramaswamy, Charlie Kirk, recent Trump endorser Tulsi Gabbard, and none other than vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance himself.
I hope Vance enjoys answering questions from the media about why he’s joining a man who wants his viewers to give serious consideration to the possibility that the Nazis should have been allowed to invade Poland, liquidate its Jews and Poles, and repopulate it with Germans. (As a follow-up, ask Vance whether he thinks Hitler would have kept a promise not to invade the USSR.) Those questions might not be fair to Vance, but then again he would probably prefer answering those than telling people the truth: He will be there because that is where he thinks Republican voters are right now. And they are not in a good place if Tucker Carlson is their guide.
More: “A decade ago it was no exaggeration to say that Limbaugh and Fox News, where Ailes presided, served as de facto assignment editors for populist right-wing media. Whatever the daily hobby horse was in their programming, that’s what talk radio and online commentators would be chattering about. Who’s the assignment editor now?”
* QED:
THE GOVERNMENT HAS MORE OR LESS ADMITTED THEY EXIST: Surging Belief in Alien Visitors Is Becoming a Serious Problem For Our Society.
USA! USA! USA! Flagstock 2024: UNC Frat Bros Get the Rager They Deserve.
Well there must be some good reason
Why they didn’t want you there
It was a party, but only for the cool guys
Nobody you know was there
— “It Was a Party,” Dan ReederCHAPEL HILL, N.C.—Journalists don’t get invited to many parties that are actually fun. They always ruin the vibe. This sad truth was reiterated on Monday hours before Flagstock 2024 when a journalist from Politico (the news blog located many, many floors below the Washington Free Beacon) asked party organizer John Noonan about the lack of female artists scheduled to perform. Moments later, once the filthy journos had been escorted to the fenced-off fun exclusion zone where they belong, a group of supremely talented female artists arrived in the VIP tent—courtesy of Hooters, which also provided the catering. Representation matters, after all.
Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™
KAMALA HARRIS’S BANANA REPUBLIC ON FREE SPEECH:
In 2019, Vice President Kamala Harris told CNN’s Jake Tapper that social media companies “are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation and it has to stop.”
Does it?
Every two-bit authoritarian in history has justified censoring its citizens as a way of protecting them from the menace of disinformation.
But social media sites, contra the reliably illiberal Harris, aren’t “directly speaking” to anyone. Millions of individuals are interacting and speaking to millions of other individuals. Really, that’s what grinds the modern Left’s gears: unsupervised conversations.
Take the Brazilian Supreme Court panel that unanimously upheld the decision by one of its justices to shut down Elon Musk’s X over alleged “misinformation” fears.
We must assume that the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, who once promised to ban guns via an executive order, agrees with Justice Alexandre de Moraes’s decision to shut down a social media platform for refusing to bend to the state’s demands of censorship.
Related: What Kamala Harris means by ‘freedom.’
When Harris mentions the freedom to vote, which is certainly a cherished freedom in the U.S., what she means is this: “With this election, we finally have the opportunity to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and the Freedom to Vote Act.” Those are two bills Democrats have long been trying to pass that would federalize and restructure elections under terms favorable to Democratic candidates. Passing the two bills is the current Democratic definition of “the freedom to vote.”
So that is the Harris “freedom” platform. With the exception of abortion, in which Democrats seek to allow any woman to have an abortion at any time in a pregnancy, the listed freedoms don’t add any freedom at all. Indeed, some, such as the freedom to “live free from the pollution fuels the climate crisis,” could lead to the curtailment of freedoms people enjoy.
In the end, when Harris talks about “freedom,” she means giving people the freedom to live under the Democratic policy agenda. Of course, millions of voters would choose otherwise. That is what the election is about.
The Ghost of FDR would approve of the definitional slight of hand:
Is it possible that the History of the 20th Century can be explained by simple reference to a change in prepositions? That is the gist of the epiphany that struck me while watching David M. Kennedy on Booknotes (C-SPAN). He and Brian Lamb were discussing the fact that this book is part of the Oxford History of the United States joining James McPherson’s excellent one-volume history of the Civil War, Battle Cry of Freedom : The Civil War Era (1988). Suddenly, the switch from “of Freedom” to “Freedom from”, in the respective titles, struck me as emblematic of the pivotal change of emphases in the Modern world. The history of America from Plymouth Rock until the Crash was essentially the story of Man’s struggle for Freedom, but Freedom in a positive sense, Freedom to do things–to worship, to speak, to gather, etc. Thus, McPherson’s book details the great convulsion of the 19th Century, the Civil War and the struggle to free the slaves–a struggle to expand freedom. But Kennedy, charting the great 20th Century convulsion, has it exactly right, the importance of the responses to the Depression by both Hoover and Roosevelt lay in their decision to elevate a negative idea of Freedom, freedom from want, from hunger, from “the vicissitudes of life” above, and against, the traditional American ideal of republican Liberty. This shift from a government aimed at protecting Freedom to one designed to provide Security is the single most important thing that happened in 20th Century America.
You may be surprised to see Hoover’s name there, but one of Kennedy’s great contributions in this book is this formal recognition by a liberal historian (joining the great conservative Paul Johnson, see Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties) that Hoover, far from being a do-nothing antediluvian, was basically a liberal interventionist, who started us down the path that lead to the New Deal. (Of course, the great difference here is that Kennedy concludes that this makes Hoover a more laudable figure, while Johnson lambastes him.) In fact, Kennedy’s reappraisal of Hoover’s activism, coupled with the quotes above, unintentionally leaves the, I believe accurate, impression that the only achievement of the New Deal–the change in focus from government as a guarantor of individual freedom to a provider of succor in time of want–was not even unique to the New Deal, but was instead a general response to the intractable Depression.
Obama’s imaginary friend Julia and Footie Pajama Boy smile as well.
BRIDGES TOO FAR: Arnhem: The daring plan that ended in disaster. New video from the Imperial War Museum:
While Operation Market Garden was one of the Allies’ biggest failures in WWII Europe, it simply delayed in the inevitable outcome, as Mark Felton explored last year in a video titled “A German Bridge Too Far — The Nijmegen Counter Offensive:”
MY SISTER JUST BOUGHT A USED ARMADA. IT’S VERY LARGE. Does the New 2025 Nissan Armada Make the Infiniti QX80 Irrelevant?
Well, here’s one selling point: “But the Armada’s interior has one irrefutable advantage. Instead of using a touchscreen for climate and vehicle settings as in the Infiniti, the Nissan uses straightforward, foolproof physical switches to change temperature, fan speed, or drive mode—too uncommon in new cars these days.”
THEY MADE HIM AN OFFER HE COULDN’T REFUSE: Starlink relents to Brazil, agrees to block Elon Musk’s X platform.
Starlink said it is complying with Brazil’s order to block Elon Musk’s X platform, backtracking from its earlier position that it would not block X until Brazilian officials released Starlink’s frozen assets. In an update on Tuesday afternoon, Starlink said it is blocking X while continuing to fight the asset freeze in court.
“Following last week’s order from [Supreme Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes] that froze Starlink’s finances and prevents Starlink from conducting financial transactions in Brazil, we immediately initiated legal proceedings in the Brazilian Supreme Court explaining the gross illegality of this order and asking the Court to unfreeze our assets,” SpaceX’s satellite broadband division said. “Regardless of the illegal treatment of Starlink in freezing of our assets, we are complying with the order to block access to X in Brazil. We continue to pursue all legal avenues, as are others who agree that @alexandre’s recent orders violate the Brazilian constitution.”
Starlink previously said that a Brazilian court order froze its assets “based on an unfounded determination that Starlink should be responsible for the fines levied—unconstitutionally—against X.” An Associated Press article said that “de Moraes froze Starlink’s accounts last week as a means to compel it to cover X’s fines that already exceeded $3 million, reasoning that the two companies are part of the same economic group.”
De Moraes ordered the suspension of X, formerly Twitter, on Friday and gave ISPs five days to block the service. His ruling was unanimously upheld on Monday by a Supreme Court panel of five judges including himself.
Brazil under Lula only pretends at lawfulness.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Global stocks tumble after Wall Street drops on worries about the economy.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Kamala Seinfeld: A Campaign About Nothing.
BE PREPARED: READYWISE – 30 Day, Emergency Food Supply. #CommissionEarned
THEN SHE’S STILL IN FAVOR OF THEM: Kamala Supports Racial Reparations In Resurfaced Videos From Last Run, Has Not Denounced Position.
EXCEPT MACHETES IN THE HANDS OF IMMIGRANT MUSLIM TERRORISTS, IT WOULD BE RACIST TO GO AFTER THOSE: Knives Out: After Virtually Outlawing Guns, U.K. Officials Now Coming After Knives.
RAPIDLY AND THOROUGHLY: How Hollywood Turned Against Free Speech.
Oscar-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin did more than defend free speech in 1995’s “The American President.” Sorkin insisted it’s baked into the Red, White and Blue cake.
Here’s part of the film’s climax, a debate highlight from President Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas):
America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve gotta want it bad, ’cause it’s gonna put up a fight. It’s gonna say, “You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.”
President Shepherd’s dunk on his political rival is the film’s slow-clap moment. Yet Sorkin, one of Hollywood’s most prominent progressives, likely wouldn’t write that dialogue today. Nor would most filmmakers.
And, if one did, someone would draw a fat red line through that page in the script.
Hollywood has turned its back on free speech. It’s triggering, White Supremacy-adjacent and brimming with “Hate.” Even worse? Elon Musk is a fan, and Hollywood progressives loathe him almost as much as a certain ex-president.
Sound harsh? The evidence is damning.
Read the whole thing.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: Coway Airmega AP-1512HH(W) True HEPA Purifier. #CommissionEarned
BUT RANDI WEINGARTEN HAD ASSURED ME REMOTE LEARNING WAS EVERY BIT AS GOOD: Harvard Launches New Intro Math Course to Address Pandemic Learning Loss. “Students don’t have the skills that we had intended downstream in the curriculum, and so it creates different trajectories in students’ math abilities.”
And those are the students admitted to Harvard, even if that doesn’t mean as much as it once did.
HEY, IT’S AFTER LABOR DAY. SHOULDN’T THERE BE NEW SHOWS ON, NOT OLD RERUNS? Biden administration to accuse Russia of sustained effort to influence 2024 election.
As Mark Hemingway writes, “Amazing how this comes out the day after a top Democrat is again busted harboring a Chinese spy.”
Good ole Obama-style “Stray Voltage” once again.