IN YOUR FACE, AUSTIN! Fort Worth bumps Austin to become fourth-largest city in Texas.
Archive for 2024
December 26, 2024
READER FAVORITE: Power Bank 50000mAh 22.5W Fast Charging Portable Charger with Flashlight. #CommissionEarned
THE E.V. BUBBLE CONTINUES TO DEFLATE: Our 2023 Fisker Ocean Extreme Longtermer Proved a Cautionary Tale.
OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH J. EDGAR HOOVER: The New Yorker Reinvents J. Edgar Hoover To Attack Kash Patel.
The New Yorker worked overtime to reinvent the late J. Edgar Hoover — who led first the Bureau of Investigation and then the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for nearly 50 years — in order to pivot and attack President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Bureau: Kash Patel.
The outlet shared an article — headlined, “How would Kash Patel Compare to J. Edgar Hoover?” — via X with the following caption: “J. Edgar Hoover made the F.B.I. into a powerful but nonpartisan colossus. Kash Patel’s chief goal, by contrast, is to weaponize the Bureau to protect Donald Trump and wreak vengeance on his Administration’s enemies.”
The article concedes that Hoover was biased and used the FBI at times to accomplish his own purposes — but claims that Patel would be worse.
According to The New Yorker’s own past reporting, that means Patel would be worse than an FBI director who for years ran “a highly secret program under that name which not only spied on civil-rights leaders, suspected Communists, public critics of the F.B.I., student activists, and many others but also sought to intimidate, smear, and blackmail them, to break up marriages, get people fired, demoralize them.”
The coordinated effort to spy on Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. — and even an attempt to coerce him to commit suicide — all fell under the COINTELPRO banner.
Another article from just seven months ago labeled the notorious Hoover “Public Enemy No. 1,” and the X post promoting it read, “As F.B.I. director, J. Edgar Hoover promised to save American democracy from those who would subvert it—while his secret programs subverted it from within. Read about Hoover’s tenure at the Bureau, which began on this day in 1924.”
Hoover was so hated by the left that by the early 1970s, that Woody Allen was cheerfully dunking on him in Bananas:
In 2022, the establishment leftist Atlantic ran a piece headlined, “How J. Edgar Hoover Went From Hero To Villain” — and now back to being a hero just two years later, in order for the New Yorker to bash a current Republican. Eustace Tilly and the Tiny Mummies weep.
IT’S NOT THE ACCIDENT, IT’S THE COVER-UP: That Russian Airliner Shoot-Down Was Even Worse Than It Looked.
READER FAVORITE: Prepared Hero Emergency Fire Blanket – 4 Pack. #CommissionEarned
SHOTGUN: First Look: LTT A300 Ultima Patrol Shotgun. This article would be more useful if it said how many shells that rather long tubular magazine holds. I guess it’s the same as the unmodified Beretta Ultima Patrol, 7+1.
FER CRYIN’ OUT LOUD: Another US Navy Jet Narrowly Missed ‘Friendly Fire’ Over Red Sea.
TREAT YOURSELF TO A GIFT: All-new Amazon Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition (32 GB).#CommissionEarned
SHAPES OF THINGS BEFORE MY EYES, JUST TEACH ME TO DESPISE. WILL TIME MAKE MEN MORE WISE? Former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson wants to run DNC.
Former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson on Thursday said she’s launching a bid for chair of the Democratic National Committee, entering a crowded field calling for seismic change to the organization.
The self-help guru, who ran twice for president, said in a video she could bring expertise to the role.
She contended she understood “why we lost it,” that voters didn’t feel that Democratic candidates had their backs on key issues like health care and the economy and that many were depressed because of “bad public policy.”
“We need to transform, in a way, we need to reinvent the Democratic Party in order to counter what MAGA is bringing to the table,” Ms. Williamson said. “There’s a collective adrenaline rush in all of that, and we have to create our own massive psychological and emotional appeal for the American people.”
She does have a serious leg-up on other recent Democrat presidential candidates in accomplishing that goal:
THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS: The Year Reheated.
We also stared in disappointment at the creations of Ms Caitlin Blunnie, whose modish but unremarkable illustrations are adorned with slogans of supposedly staggering profundity. Among the penetrating insights to be found were “Craft is resistance in a late-stage capitalist society,” “Smash the state and masturbate,” and, entirely without irony, “Abortion builds new futures.”
Further artistic rumblings were detected at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, where patrons were warned that, by liking landscape paintings, they risk moral corruption. Via new and scrupulously progressive signage, visitors were informed that the sight of a Constable landscape may trigger TERRIFYING BLOOD AND SOIL TENDENCIES. Or at least inspire thoughts of historical attachment, continuity, and belonging – thoughts deemed disconcerting, racist, and very much frowned upon, if only by the – wait for it – keepers of our heritage.
The thrills of public transport came to our attention in April – specifically, San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system, where female commuters were issued with “bystander intervention cards” with which to repel the network’s growing number of junkies, muggers and public masturbators. The cards, we were assured, albeit unconvincingly, are “a concrete way to deal with an unsafe situation.” More obvious methods of restoring some semblance of civilisation – say, by arresting the aforementioned junkies, muggers and masturbators – were left seemingly unexplored.
We also marvelled at an attempt to problematise the much-loved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, via the joyless prattle of Lukas Shayo. Mr Shayo, a graduate of CUNY and denizen of Brooklyn, attempted to establish his credentials by telling us how “violent” and “sexist” the strip is, and by complaining about the absence of smartphones, the inaccurate depiction of imaginary dinosaurs, and the strip’s protagonist spending “too much time by himself,” thereby allowing his imagination to entertain the reader. Those familiar with the strip may wonder whether complaining in print about Calvin’s mom being, well, a mom, and about the “sexism” of a cartoon six-year-old, should result in some reflection on one’s chosen career, and one’s life choices more generally.
And via the Reddit forum r/mypartneristrans, we pondered romantic complications of a very modern kind – namely, the woes of a woman who wants to pretend that she’s a gay man, but who was thwarted by her male partner now wanting to pretend he’s a woman, resulting in something not unlike straightness, albeit with extra steps. And so, we had a woman who expects to be taken seriously as a man, but who can’t bring herself to take seriously as a woman her own male partner. The woman in question struggled with her partner’s claims of sudden-onset transgenderism and fabulist pronouns, while expecting observance of her own. Which did rather cast some doubt on the broader enterprise.
The ghosts of the Weimar Republic are shaking the heads at 2024’s level of insanity and shouting that we really need to dial the craziness back a notch or twenty.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Late-Night TV Has a Luigi Mangione Problem. “If this had happened once or even twice it could be written off. Three times? On three different hard-Left showcases? Writing it off would be a mistake.”
IF COMPANIES CAN’T PROTECT THEIR DATA, THEY SHOULDN’T KEEP IT: Health care giant Ascension says 5.6 million patients affected in cyberattack.
KWANZAA: A Fake Holiday With A Racist Goal, Created By A Criminal Madman.
Perhaps Kwanzaa is observed because this part of the Kwanzaa story is rarely mentioned by the mainstream media.
When he invented the holiday, Karenga said his goal was to “give Blacks an alternative to the existing holiday and give Blacks an opportunity to celebrate themselves and history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society.”
Why would an African American of Christian faith want to dissociate from their religion on Christmas or a Jew of color want to ignore the joy of a family lighting their Chanukiah (Menorah) sing-song and eating jelly donuts?
This holiday raised by some to the level of Christmas by wokeism has a purpose totally antithetical to Christmas. While Christmas is meant to unify, Kwanzaa is meant to divide and isolate Black Americans from the rest of the people who practice their same faith.
Related: College Republicans tweeted out wishes for a “happy Kwanza” and got absolutely destroyed for it.
In 2021, Kamala Harris Touted ‘Seven Principles’ of Marxist-Rooted Kwanzaa.
Vice President Kamala Harris celebrated the beginning of Kwanzaa Sunday night, an underlying Marxist holiday created by black nationalists, by praising one of the ‘seven principles’ of Kwanzaa, which happen to coincide with the seven principles of the Symbionese Liberation Army.
And she’s still at it! Pander-ific! Kamala Claims She Grew Up Celebrating Kwanzaa, There’s Just a Couple of Problems (Watch).
Kamala: "I grew up celebrating Kwanzaa"
Kwanzaa was invented in 1966 by Marxist professor Maulana Karenga to undermine Christmas, 2 years after Harris was born.
5 years later he was jailed for kidnapping, torturing innocent women in California.
Karenga also founded the United… pic.twitter.com/iLRzS1Njl6
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) December 26, 2024
I’m pretty sure Tom Wolfe didn’t write Radical Chic as a how-to guide.
BUT THE NARRATIVE!
Antarctic sea ice extent is 17% higher today than it was in 1979. Ice doesn't lie, but climate scientists do.https://t.co/jEmTvGVPdghttps://t.co/cj0675DQBt pic.twitter.com/ivUCtobivp
— Tony Heller (@TonyClimate) December 25, 2024
Increased ice formation is a sign of… something bad that we did, I’m sure.
THIS YEAR’S CHRISTMAS DEBUNKING: The Christmas season always seems to induce an irresistible urge among Lefty “scholars” and “journalists,” with a result that one of the latter interviews one of the former and publishes something like the New York Times’ December 21 “A Conversation About the Virgin Birth that Maybe Wasn’t” by columnist Nicholas Kristoff.
“Hate to barge in on your Christmas joy as you reflect on the miracle of the Incarnation, but The New York Times has delivered its annual dose of skepticism wrapped in tinsel. This time, it’s an interview with Elaine Pagels, a famed Ivy League biblical scholar. You’d expect some highbrow insights from the hoity toity Times, but instead, it’s a predictable grab bag of speculation and lazy thinking,” Is Jesus Alive proprietor Erik Manning writes in a lengthy dismemberment of this comedy of factual errors, fallacious logic and uninformed analyses.
Just to cite one of the many examples Manning addresses, Pagels makes a big deal out of the fact that the Gospel of Mark, which is commonly thought to be the earliest written of the four Gospels, makes no mention of the Virgin Birth of Jesus.
“There’s also a whopper of an argument from silence here that needs addressing. Just because Mark doesn’t mention the virgin birth, it doesn’t mean he’s unaware of it. Omitting a detail isn’t the same as denying it, and history is full of examples where major events go unmentioned.
“Take Pliny the Younger, for instance. In two detailed letters to Tacitus, he describes the eruption of Mount Vesuvius but says nothing about the destruction of Pompeii or Herculaneum—two of the biggest stories from that disaster. Or consider Henry Oldenburg, who wrote extensively during the Great Plague of 1665-1666 but barely mentioned the plague itself. Paul doesn’t mention Jesus’ miracles, but I’m guessing Pagels still believes Jesus was known as a wonder-worker. If these omissions don’t equal denial, why assume Mark’s silence does,” Manning writes.
Manning’s is a lengthy piece and it requires an attentive reader to follow the Pagels arguments and Manning’s critique. But it’s well-worth your time to have such a chronicle of the weaknesses in so much of the popular skepticism about Jesus, the Gospels and the miracle at the heart of Christmas.
NICE FAKE NEWS NETWORK YOU’VE GOT THERE, IT WOULD BE A SHAME IF ANYTHING WERE TO HAPPEN TO IT: Trump’s New FCC Chief Just Read the Riot Act to Disney’s Bob Iger.
WHERE ARE THESE CHILDREN? Do you know that at least 500,000 children, many of them toddlers, have been brought illegally into this country and then they disappeared? Most likely, they were sold by the Mexican drug cartels into hellish lives of sex trafficking or child slavery.
“Where Are the Children: Crisis at the Border” is a new two-part documentary by Epoch TV that digs deep into how something so horrible could happen in America, based on the testimony of whistleblowers from within the federal government. You will want to share this once you’ve seen it because evil like this cannot be allowed to happen in our America.
COMMIES GOTTA COMMIE: Sweeping Vietnam internet law comes into force.
New Vietnamese internet rules requiring Facebook and TikTok to verify user identities and hand over data to authorities came into force on Wednesday, in what critics say is the latest attack on freedom of expression.
Under “Decree 147”, all tech giants operating in Vietnam must verify users’ accounts via their phone numbers or Vietnamese identification numbers and store that information alongside their full name and date of birth.
They must provide that data to authorities on request and remove any content the government regards as “illegal” within 24 hours.
The new rules came into force on Wednesday, state media VNExpress said.
All social media sites had been given 90 days to provide data on “the total number of regular visits from Vietnam” and the number of regular users per month to authorities, the website said.
“Decree 147 will be used to publicly suppress those with different viewpoints,” said activist Dang Thi Hue, who writes about politics and social issues on her Facebook account, which has 28,000 followers.
Lefties would love to be able to do the same in this country.
LEADERSHIP MATTERS: Americans Are Hopeful Again… Can You Guess Why?