NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Pandemic Fraud Juror Got a Bag Full of $120,000 and a Promise of More if She’ll Acquit.
Archive for 2024
June 4, 2024
NEVER FORGET JUNE 4, 1989: Zhou Fengsuo, a Tiananmen student leader, reflects on the day that shook the conscience of the free world.
SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER! Black-Women-Only Grant Program Likely Violates Federal Law, Isn’t Protected by First Amendment.
STOP, YOU HAD ME AT “GETTING FIT”: Getting fit is great – but it could turn you into a rightwing jerk. “But there is a dark side to wellness, which I always, for shorthand, thought of as political: getting fit makes you more rightwing. The mechanism is incredibly simple: you embark on this voyage of self-improvement, and more or less immediately see results. You feel stronger and more energetic, probably your mood lifts, and pretty soon you think you are master of your own destiny. You’re still not, by the way: destiny does not care about your step count. But until that fact catches up with you, which it may never, there you are, high on self-righteousness. You can tell this has happened to you when you start inhaling performatively, like the hero of an Ayn Rand novel.”
Stay weak and woke for the cause, comrades.
THIS IS THE TERRIBLE REVIEW OF REACHER WE’VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR:
Reacher spends most of his time in the books saving damsels from genuine distress and teaching murderous bad guys they are not the toughest kids on the block. But given the times we live in it was inevitable that this light entertainment would eventually be labeled racist. Today, Vulture published a very belated review of the series which does exactly that.
Wallpaper TV is marked by an easygoing approachability and a low lift for concentration. These are series propelled by vibes that you can groove to as a viewer but whose characterization, narrative, and visual dimensions hew toward simplicity, if not banality. Amusement is tantamount, but these shows don’t ask much of the audience,and they certainly don’t challenge their fans. They’re perfect in the background, half-watched while sweeping the apartment. This is what I was expecting from Reacher: a mildly appealing series that required little of me, spoke to my mother’s televisual interests, and featured a tank of a man who was easy enough on the eyes. But swiftly after starting the series I realized there was something more complex about Reacher, a glaringly white fantasy that can’t help but crack under the weight of its conservative values. This isn’t merely hackneyed wallpaper TV; it’s uncanny fiction that exemplifies just how intensely Hollywood has returned to whiteness after years of feigning interest in diversity broadly and Blackness with a particular extricative zeal.Watching Reacher isn’t easygoing; it’s like watching a frightening manifestation of the free-falling American empire on a loop…
My prior knowledge of this literary franchise was admittedly shallow, mostly informed by my experience of the dim Tom Cruise movies. But this Reacher adaptation is a different beast. And beast is exactly the right word for it — featuring as it does a Dodge Charger who’s achieved human form (actor Alan Ritchson). When Reacher, who refuses to be addressed by his first name, Jack, saunters into the fictional town of Margrave, Georgia, the show portrays his masculinity as exceedingly powerful yet good-natured; something to be obeyed but also preserved and exalted. In the premiere episode, Reacher wordlessly halts a domestic-abuse incident on his way into a diner, where, once inside, he doesn’t get to enjoy his cup of black coffee, or the slice of peach pie marketed as the best in the state, because he’s soon arrested for a murder he didn’t commit. He asserts his innocence at the police station, refusing to cooperate unless someone releases him from the zip ties encircling his wrists. (The handcuffs are too small, of course.) “Get the box cutter,” the routinely disrespected police chief says. “It’s okay. I got it,” Reacher says before popping the zip tie by sheer force. He picks up the fallen plastic. “Do you guys recycle?” A knowing smirk never leaves his face. Reacher knows that if a white man is tall enough, the world will bend to his whims.
I just have one question for this author. What did she think of the Equalizer series of movies? That series is based on the same exact sort of pulp storytelling, i.e. a heavily trained fighter/killer who lives off the grid but who also abides by a personal code stumbles upon a group of bad guys who he decided to bring down because he doesn’t like what they do. The outcome is usually very brutal for the bad guys. Those films all starred Denzel Washington instead of Alan Ritchson and they were successful enough that they made three of them.
We’ll get to the modern-day Equalizer franchise in a moment, but first, Christian Toto adds: Vulture: Reacher a ‘White Power Fantasy.’ Readers roast op-ed attacking Prime Video series, American conservatives.
The writer repeatedly conflates “white power” with conservatism in crude fashion. The two are interchangeable, giving the author wiggle room to explore these observations.
Vulture, the pop culture arm of New York Magazine, stirred up trouble within its readership. Its Facebook page visitors overwhelmingly shredded the “white-power” argument.
I spent 26 years in journalism, and this is just embarrassing. I have never seen a piece miss the mark this badly. There is nothing “white-power” about this character or the series. The character’s best friend is a woman and a person of color. He loves old blues music and hangs out at a black-owned barber shop (in season one). He isn’t hateful or racist in any way, shape or form. This is so far off the mark that the author comes off as both projecting and desperate. – Jeremy D. Bonfiglio
In her twisting of the series, she deftly ignored one of the main characters who appeared prominently in both seasons: Reacher’s former army lieutenant, Neagley (Maria Sten). Neagley is mixed race and fully trusted by Reacher. Her prominent role in season 1 is only enhanced in season 2. Odd how her character is entirely not mentioned in the Vulture review, perhaps because it doesn’t support the false narrative she is trying to push.
– Ryan Littlefield
The genre that Reacher works in, which Rob Long dubbed “The Good Psychopath” in the April issue of Commentary isn’t even sexist these days, let alone racist:
The Equalizer entered American culture as a television character in the eponymous CBS Network series starring Edward Woodward as Robert McCall. In the original television series, which ran from 1985 to 1989, McCall is also a former intelligence agent with a shadowy past who fights for the little guy—in a realistically rendered crime-riddled New York City, so it was no fantasy—but the body count is much, much smaller. The show was rebooted in 2021, this time with Queen Latifah as a gender-adjusted Robyn McCall, and has been a steady performer for CBS for four seasons. Wait, The Equalizer reboot has been on TV for four seasons? I can hear you asking.
So there’s a feature-film version of Robert McCall that’s blood and guts and revenge, and there’s a broadcast television version that’s tamer and less violent, but the key elements are the same: utterly powerless victims, utterly remorseless villains, and a hero who settles the score and emerges without a scratch.
There’s also a streaming version of essentially the same character. Reacher, which can be found on Amazon Prime. It doesn’t have the polish or production values of its feature-film cousin—the dialogue is hilariously awful, the sets are spare and overlit—but it’s got the same basic tick-tock. Reacher, played by the mountainous Alan Ritchson, is, you guessed it, a morally upright and highly skilled warrior with a shadowy paramilitary past who helps the powerless fight bad guys. The bad guys in Reacher are super-duper nuts. The first season featured disembowelings, a crucifixion, a sneering psychopathic rich kid, and a villain who inexplicably carries a crystal-topped walking stick.
Reacher is the number-one title on Prime Video, and it’s available across the globe. The first season was hugely popular with audiences of all descriptions, and the second season became Prime’s top show within six days of its release. In other words, Prime Video discovered what Sony and CBS already knew. People like morally upright heroes with shadowy paramilitary backgrounds who use their warrior skills to help the little guy and kill the bad guys. Or the shorter version: Audiences love a Good Psychopath.
For decades, there have been gnostic film critics who can see racism everywhere, no matter how sensitive Hollywood has been on this issue since at least the early 1960s. With the popularity of streaming offsetting the woes of the big screen, no one should be surprised to see them attacking the wares available inside the Roku box instead these days.
JUST IN TIME FOR THE ELECTION: 5 million doses of vaccine against H5N1 avian flu being prepared.
AYAAN HIRSI ALI: We Have Been Subverted.
The question, of course, is who is doing the subverting. Who is trying to unravel America and the West?
Again, I am feeling only my part of the elephant, but I can discern at least three forces.
The first: American Marxists. This category includes old card-carrying communists, red-diaper baby socialists, antifa anarchists, and many of whom we now call woke. Though the Soviet Union collapsed decades ago, the Soviet worldview has found familiar proponents: young Americans and their professors. They are no longer advancing their cause merely through class struggle, but through the fusion of racial, class, and anticolonial struggles. Theirs is now a cultural communism; they lead subversion through the institutions with the ultimate aim of overthrowing the West.
The thundering socialists of the past (think of poor Bernie) seemed to earnestly care about the working class. Perhaps they did so naively, but at least they loved the poor. Does AOC? Rashida Tlaib? My former countrywoman, Ilhan Omar?
The second force is the radical Islamists, who are riding the coattails of the communists to power. A good example is the Muslim Brotherhood and its many tentacles. Of these tentacles, some are openly religious, like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Students Association, each with chapters in nearly every American university. Other organizations don a secular mask, like the so-called Students for Justice in Palestine. These groups have become increasingly confident over the past months. Anti-Israel Muslim candidates recently won elected seats in countries like England, where imams talk openly about reestablishing the caliphate in Europe.
The third force is the Chinese Communist Party. The most obvious avenues through which the CCP has spread subversion in America is through its numerous Confucius Institutes. These organizations have been vehicles for Chinese espionage within major American academic institutions. Then there is TikTok, an addictive social media app controlled by the CCP, which presents Chinese children wholesome, educational content while wreaking havoc on American kids—polarizing them and feeding them anti-American propaganda.
Read the whole thing.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL DIDN’T EVEN TRY: Even the MSM Can’t Hide How Stupid Biden’s Ceasefire Plan Is.
THIS SOUNDS OVER THE TOP, BUT IT REALLY ISN’T: Fauci is the single most destructive force of the 21st century, and he must be held accountable: Fauci’s record as the coronavirus point man in two White House administrations is clear and undeniable. He is responsible for advancing mountains of fraud, carnage, negligence, and suffering.
Related:
Fauci vs. Fauci on COVID transmission: pic.twitter.com/zQLfhZBLia
— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) June 3, 2024
YES. NEXT QUESTION? Is There a Racial Component to the Recent Controversy Involving Caitlin Clark? “The WNBA is finally getting eyeballs, and what we see is a bunch of nasty women brutalizing Caitlin Clark because this is what predictably happens concerning women in the workforce. Whether it be on the court or in corporate America, it’s women bullying other women that breeds actual toxicity. Clark was the first overall pick. She’s starting to play better on a very bad and rebuilding Indiana Fever team. She’s doing her job, but the rest of the league seems to have a bounty on her. Clark won’t break and probably will soak up the intense scrutiny surrounding her impact on the sport, but Saturday’s game against the Chicago Sky bred new controversy. Clark got body-checked hard by Sky guard Chennedy Carter, who could be seen mouthing ‘bitch’ before laying into her. . . . Women basketball players have whined for years that they don’t get their attention. It’s here, ladies, and you’re about to blow it. And, of course, there’s a racial component to this that’s nasty as well. If Clark were black and being assaulted on the court by a bunch of white players, it would be more of a story. It is getting media attention, but half of it is begrudgingly so. The usual lefty writers, who can’t stand that the WNBA is getting more popular because a white, non-lesbian is the marquee player, will pen the usual thought pieces about how Clark’s rise is white privilege reloaded. We’ve seen that already, but these antics are ridiculous. Even Charles Barkley had to call out these whiny, jealous women in the league.”
Related:
Hating the only player in thirty years to make people care about your league is next level dumb for WNBA players. Honest question has there been a rookie hated like this in men’s sports? I can’t think of one in my life. https://t.co/77f5CizCRa
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) June 1, 2024
FACTS ARE STUBBORN THINGS: Why Biden’s economic comeback story is falling flat. “It’s hard to spin a comeback story when voters think the president is trying to recover from shooting himself in the foot.”
MARK JUDGE: Press Cowards’ Hypocritical Lament Over Media’s Lack of ‘Balls’ and ‘Swagger.’
I am intentionally resisting comparing these guys to girls. The truth is the Irish-Catholic girls I grew up with are much tougher than these guys. They also have much better senses of humor.
Consider: In 2018, when I was tossed into the political Thunderdome with Kavanaugh, the media were having fainting spells going through old things I had written. There was a piece I wrote in Splice Today—one of the last truly free media outlets—defending crime movies and male passion. There were the ribald jokes from my high school yearbook. They even got the vapors examining The Unknown Hoya, an underground student newspaper we did at Georgetown Prep. The media went full-on Stasi. They reached epic levels of hysteria but now they refuse to investigate my explosive and well-sourced claims that there was a criminal conspiracy funded and aided by the Democratic National Committee to destroy a Supreme Court nominee.
When it comes to revealing anything negative about the Democratic Party, all the tough-guy newsmen are now missing in action. The likes of wizened journalists of the caliber of say, Peter Hamill, have been replaced by Cowardly Lion avatars, who jump head-first out the window whenever I call them out.
Speak truth to power? These eunuchs are afraid of a book.
Jack Shafer’s response to the WaPo dumping Sally Buzbee instills a small amount of hope: The Rupert Murdoch-ization of the Washington Post.
Still, the regime got a bad review Monday morning at a staff meeting Lewis and Murray held at the Post. In exchanges that were described to me as heated by people present, staffers wanted to know why Lewis had recruited all his old buddies and why a greater search for new leadership had not been conducted to interview women or non-white people*. Lewis stood his ground and indicated that the flight manifest had been filed and no major alterations would be forthcoming.
The meeting might have marked one of the few occasions that something resembling public sympathy had been generated for Buzbee. Never popular with the Post staff and given to speaking in pillowy generalities like a politician, Buzbee was frequently characterized, unfairly, perhaps, by staffers as being only slightly aware of what her paper published.
The newsroom changes put in place by Lewis will not be immediate. Murray will run the Post until after the election, at which point he’ll hand off to Winnett, who will be in charge of what Lewis calls the “core coverage areas,” defined by him as “politics, investigations, business, technology, sports and features.” Murray will then run the new third newsroom.
* I’ll be curious to see how the new regime at the Post handles their more elderly employees, who are clearly being kept on these days for purely sentimental reasons:
The obvious litmus test is the decision about Taylor Lorenz. If they are serious, the new management will immediately let her go; if they are not, they will find an excuse to keep her on.
Either way, it's a great test case. We will see if losing half your audience and $77… https://t.co/z6EvAuJJ2Q
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) June 3, 2024
UPDATE:
Would you want to be the one to have "the talk" with Taylor Lorenz?
Well, I mean if you weren't allowed to laugh and record it and shit.
— Passably Affable (@tbrusletten) June 4, 2024
DISPATCHES FROM THE PALACE GUARD MEDIA:
Asked if he can do the job at 85 years old (which he would be in a second term), Biden tells TIME:
“I can do it better than anybody you know. You’re looking at me, I can take you too.”https://t.co/4cklIYuak9 pic.twitter.com/9SrdASoaMD
— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) June 4, 2024
Long before he entered his dotage, Joe Biden has spent his entire career insulting and belittling journalists – and curiously, they all just sit there and take it, instead of proving that they’re not his party’s operatives with bylines.
But Time’s problem is that Biden is so far gone, there’s only so much they can do to keep propping him up: The Transcript From Biden’s Interview With Time Is a Mess.
“For example, the idea that if when Putin decided to go into Russia,” Biden said at one point before correcting himself. “I mean, he’s gonna go from Russia into Ukraine—the reason why I cleared the intelligence so we can release the information we knew that he was going to attack, was to let the world know we were still in charge.” Biden conveniently omitted — and TIME did not raise — the Biden administration’s intelligence sharing with the Chinese Communist Party in a failed attempt to have Beijing talk Putin out of invading.
Biden repeatedly mixed up Russia with Ukraine throughout his comments on the subject. He also mixed up Iraq and Iran at points, including his refutation of “the idea that you had nuclear arsenals in Iran, that were being, I mean, in Iraq…” At another point, Biden confused Taiwan with South Korea. Biden also said that America has “the strongest alliance in all of America,” before correcting his claim to “all of history.”
The interview also saw Biden trail off a number of times, ending an assertion about being “on a slippery slope for war if we don’t do something about Ukraine” with “It’s just not gonna…anyway…,” according to TIME’s transcript.
When asked about Israel’s prosecution of the war started by Hamas on October 7, Biden said “I’m not going to respond to that because I’m about to make a…anyway.” He’s about to make a anyway, folks.
Even TIME struggled to determine what the president said, having to insert admissions of transcription defeat at points such as this in the interview: “Hamas could say (unintelligible) and done period,” and again later: “You know, I don’t have any (unintelligible)…”
Exit question: “Look, the buck stops with Biden, but what are his handlers doing by putting him in these situations? And this happened with one of the most friendly outlets out there. Imagine what he’s going to look like at the debates if he gets even the slightest amount of pushback from a moderator. Biden is senile, and those around him are too scared to keep him out of the spotlight. That’s a bad combination.”
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GOOD ADVICE: Chicago 911 Chief: Buy A Gun. “In Chicago, at least half the time there are no police officers available to respond to 911 calls for help – not even the highest priority calls like stabbings, domestics, rapes, gunshot victims and so forth. Not even for a triple homicide. In August 2022, it took police 20 minutes to arrive at the scene of a triple homicide with two more victims critically injured and a suspect nearby.”
NOTHING CONCENTRATES THE MIND LIKE THE PROSPECT OF AN ELECTION IN NOVEMBER: Will Biden’s new border restrictions sway voters?
BLUE STATE BLUES: Rubio’s Coastal Grill, citing rising business costs, abruptly shuts down 48 restaurants in California.
As a college student in San Diego, Ralph Rubio discovered fish tacos while on spring break in Baja California. And in 1983 he opened a modest walk-up stand, helping popularize fish tacos in the country and seeing his business, known over the last decade as Rubio’s Coastal Grill, grow to about 200 restaurants in California and several other states.
But the pandemic slammed the company, prompting it to shut down restaurants in Florida and Colorado. Rubio’s also has been struggling under the shadow of Mexican restaurant giant Chipotle in the hyper-competitive segment known as fast casual. And then there were the costs: rising food prices and increasing worker wages.
On Monday, Rubio’s confirmed that it had closed 48 of its California restaurants on Friday — more than a third of its already slimmed-down chain of 134 restaurants.
Rubio’s, in a statement Monday issued by media strategist Sitrick & Co., attributed the closings to the rising cost of doing business in California.
The big chains are better able to absorb the punishment Sacramento loves to dish out than smaller chains like Rubio’s are. They’re also generally more compliant with big government’s social goals.
THE ENEMY WITHIN: U.S. Media and Students Do Precisely What Hamas Leader Urged.
INSURRECTION: Anti-Israel protesters burn UC Berkeley police vehicle with ‘incendiary device’ in ‘retaliation’ for arrests. Have you noticed that MAGA people don’t “retaliate” for arrests?
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: ‘The manufacturing side of the economy appears to have stalled,’ ISM says.
The industrial side of the economy is unlikely to generate sustained growth until interest rates fall and a lower cost of borrowing entices customers to buy more goods or invest.
“Companies are extremely cautious with any form of investment,” Fiore said.
At the same time, higher prices of raw materials such as oil, plastics, copper and aluminum are putting upward pressure on prices. That could keep inflation elevated.
Previously: Biden claims his economic policies are reviving manufacturing, making his case at a wind farm plant.
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THEY NEED TO PAY MORE: Don Surber: The Media Pays for Getting Trump Wrong. “Two stories broke on Monday that are intertwined. One is the realization by liberals that President Trump may win by a landslide because of the kangaroo courts of New York. . . . The other story is the Sunday night massacre at the Washington Post — the firing of its editor — which sent shockwaves through the credentialed media, which only goes to show how out of touch the media is.”