Archive for 2024
March 11, 2024
READER FAVORITE: BISSELL Little Green Multi-Purpose Portable Carpet and Upholstery Cleaner. #CommissionEarned
BACK TO THE FUTURE: Return of the lever-action gun. “Like the shotgun, the lever gun has a long, successful history of protecting home and family. They are relatively easy to learn to operate and shoot. This is especially true for the casual shooters who already have experience in plinking and hunting with them. Since the armed citizen is rarely ever engaged in lengthy shootouts, the lever action holds plenty of ammunition to take care of business when properly applied to the threat. However, should the need arise, it is one of the few firearms that can be reloaded while it is still instantly ready to fire.”
MAYBE THIS WILL BE MORE CONVINCING THAN HIS LAME ATTEMPTS AT BLACKFACE:
Breaking: BLM hoaxer Shaun King and his wife have converted to Islam. King identifies as black and previously identified as a Christian pastor. He regularly uses his large social media platform to threaten people.
In 2018, King falsely accused a white man (Robert Cantrell) of… pic.twitter.com/QynYcD6lKi
— Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) March 11, 2024
But if that doesn’t work, he can always transition to being a woman.
THIS OUGHT TO END WELL: ‘The Purge’ Comes to Pittsburgh.
ROBERT SPENCER: China Plans to ‘Sinicize’ Islam. We Can Learn From This, But Not in the Way You Might Think.
Sinicization, in the case of Christianity, has involved rewriting parts of the Bible to remove or alter passages that might inspire readers to think critically about Communism, forcing Christians to celebrate as heroes Communists who betrayed the Church, and requiring Christian teachers to attend Communist indoctrination sessions.
Will similar measures, applied to Islam, defang the Religion of Peace and end the possibility of jihad terror in China? That’s what Chinese Communist leaders are banking on. But they’re being short-sighted.
What is likely to happen in China, given the lessons of history, is that the “Sinicization” of Islam will proceed, and initially it will appear to be a comprehensive success. Muslims in China will appear to be practicing an Islam with Chinese characteristics, and to have assimilated completely into Communist Chinese society.
The Communist victory celebrations, however, will be premature.
Read the whole thing.
ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE: NASA’s Europa Jupiter Mission will be packed with humanity’s messages.
CHANGE: Over 140,000 Farms Lost in 5 Years.
Between 2017 and 2022, the number of farms in the U.S. declined by 141,733 or 7%, according to USDA’s 2022 Census of Agriculture, released on Feb. 13. Acres operated by farm operations during the same timeframe declined by 20.1 million (2.2%), a loss equivalent to an area about the size of Maine. Only 1.88% of acres operated and 1% of farm operations were classified under a non-family corporate farm structure.
Conducted every five years, the Census of Agriculture collects data on land use and ownership, producer characteristics, production practices, income and expenditures. USDA defines a farm as an operation that produced and sold, or normally would have sold, $1,000 or more of agricultural products during the census year.
While the number of farm operations and acres operated declined, the value of agricultural production increased, rising from $389 billion in 2017 to $533 billion in 2022 (40% nominally and 17% adjusted for inflation). These updated numbers highlight the continuing trend of fewer operations farming fewer acres of land but producing more each year.
The productivity increases are wonderful. But it sure would be nice if Bidenomics allowed it to be reflected in my grocery bill.
OLD AND BUSTED: “That’s Not Writing, That’s Just Typing.”
The New Hotness? That’s not writing, that’s just copy and pasting! Oscar-nominated film The Holdovers accused of plagiarism by screenwriter in bombshell allegations day before event: ‘Genuinely overwhelming.’
On the eve of Sunday’s Oscars, Best Picture nominee “The Holdovers” has been accused of being “plagiarized line-by-line” from a decade-old screenplay for a film written about ten years ago that was never made, according to a report.
Simon Stephenson, best known for working on popular movies “Luca” and “Paddington 2,” made the bombshell allegations in emails to the Writer’s Guild of America that were obtained by Variety.
The screenwriter alleges in the missives that “The Holdovers” director Alexander Payne likely read a script for his eerily similar movie “Frisco” when it made the rounds around Hollywood in 2013 on the industry’s “black list” of most like scripts, where it peaked at number three.
“The evidence the holdovers screenplay has been plagiarised line-by-line from “Frisco” is genuinely overwhelming – anybody who looks at even the briefest sample pretty much invariably uses the word ‘brazen,’” Stephenson wrote in the email he sent to the WGA’s director of credits Lesley Mackey, after speaking with him about the movies’ similarities.
The American television industry has long suffered from what the late Todd Gitlin called “Recombinant Culture” in his 1983 book Inside Prime Time; but if Stephenson’s accusations are correct, the big screen may be really getting carried away by the notion.
DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA:
What's that line liberals always trot out about "when they tell you who they are, believe them"? They want to manipulate and surgically mutilate kids. This is evil, and I'm not going to even entertain the idea there's nuance here. https://t.co/1JwJAvX1fx
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) March 11, 2024
Tom Wolfe left the New York magazine office long ago, but to borrow from a portion of his epochal 1975 essay on “The ‘Me’ Decade,” I’m sure he’d get a wry laugh seeing how it’s transformed over the decades:
In 1961 a copywriter named Shirley Polykoff was working for the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency on the Clairol hair-dye account when she came up with the line: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” In a single slogan she had summed up what might be described as the secular side of the Me Decade. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a—!” (You have only to fill in the blank.)
This formula accounts for much of the popularity of the women’s-liberation or feminist movement. “What does a woman want?” said Freud. Perhaps there are women who want to humble men or reduce their power or achieve equality or even superiority for themselves and their sisters. But for every one such woman, there are nine who simply want to fill in the blank as they see fit. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as … a free spirit!” (Instead of … a house slave: a cleaning woman, a cook, a nursemaid, a station-wagon hacker, and an occasional household sex aid.) But even that may be overstating it, because often the unconscious desire is nothing more than: Let’s talk about Me. The great unexpected dividend of the feminist movement has been to elevate an ordinary status—woman, housewife—to the level of drama. One’s very existence as a woman—as Me—becomes something all the world analyzes, agonizes over, draws cosmic conclusions from, or, in any event, takes seriously. Every woman becomes Emma Bovary, Cousin Bette, or Nora … or Erica Jong or Consuelo Saah Baehr.
Among men the formula becomes: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a … Casanova or a Henry VIII” … instead of a humdrum workadaddy, eternally faithful, except perhaps for a mean little skulking episode here and there, to a woman who now looks old enough to be your aunt and has atrophied calves, and is an embarrassment to be seen with when you take her on trips. The right to shuck overripe wives and take on fresh ones was once seen as the prerogative of kings only, and even then it was scandalous. In the 1950s and 1960s it began to be seen as the prerogative of the rich, the powerful, and the celebrated (Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and show-business figures), although it retained the odor of scandal. Wife-shucking damaged Adlai Stevenson’s chances of becoming president in 1952 and Rockefeller’s chances of becoming the Republican presidential nominee in 1964 and 1968. Until the 1970s, wife-shucking made it impossible for an astronaut to be chosen to go into space. Today, in the Me Decade, it becomes normal behavior, one of the factors that have pushed the divorce rate above 50 percent.
“‘If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a—!’ (You have only to fill in the blank.)” In the 21st century, what could possibly go wrong?
HE’S FINE: Biden’s Unmedicated Brain Continues to Fail Him After State of the Union. “Pennsylvania, I have a message for you: send me to Congress!”
INSTAPUNDIT REMAINS 100% HUMAN: Proliferating ‘news’ sites spew AI-generated fake stories. “Propaganda-spewing websites have typically relied on armies of writers, but generative artificial intelligence tools now offer a significantly cheaper and faster way to fabricate content that is often hard to decipher from authentic information.”
Related (From Ed):
[Four years ago today], the World Health Organization declared the spread of what was then called the novel coronavirus to be a pandemic. Some 4,200 Covid-19 deaths had been confirmed at that point. Almost 7 million would follow, though the true number of lives lost is believed to be much higher. In March of 2020, the pathogen had already spread to more than 100 countries. Horrific waves would sweep across Europe and the US, which for much of the pandemic suffered the worst death toll of all. No part of the planet would be untouched, as India later suffered a crushing surge and, more recently, China after the sudden lifting of precautions. The constant wail of sirens that punctured the night in cities like New York—an initial epicenter of the global disaster—has receded. But with close to 1,000 confirmed Covid-19 deaths every day all over the world, the pandemic isn’t over.
Bloomberg continues to track the global coronavirus pandemic. Click here for daily updates.
How odd. Joe Biden told me that he was going to shut down the virus:
It’s not all that surprising that some quarters of the authoritarian left wants the pandemic to continue indefinitely: “The sinister cruelty of lockdown has been laid bare. We now know just how drunk on tyranny the political class was during the pandemic.”
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: How Toxic Is DEI? These Companies Are Turning Down Billions in Free Money to Avoid It. “The free money in question is the $50 billion or so in official bribes for companies to build state-of-the-art chip fabrication plants in this country — like companies used to do when this was still a decent place to do business.”
ZONE OF IRONY: ‘As a Jew’ Oscar moment shows how woke antisemitism works.
Unless you’re a film buff, you may not have heard of Jonathan Glazer before his viral moment at this year’s annual Academy Awards ceremony. After “The Zone of Interest”—a highly-praised film about the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp that is very loosely based on a Martin Amis novel with the same title—was named the winner of the Oscar for Best International Feature Film, Glazer appeared on the stage along with the rest of the production team to accept their trophies. Standing with producer James Wilson and their billionaire financial backer Leonard Blavatnik, Glazer, who wrote and directed the movie, chose not to speak extemporaneously but instead read the following prepared statement:
“Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness in a Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza—all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”
The tortured syntax of his comments notwithstanding, what Glazer said wasn’t merely deeply offensive. It marked a new low in Hollywood’s descent into fashionable rationalizations of hatred for Jews. It also showed us how the new woke antisemitism works, especially when its standard-bearers are Jews with little or no connection to their heritage. As such, it was the quintessential “as a Jew” moment in which persons invoke their Jewish identity to denounce other Jews.
* * * * * * * *
To link the Holocaust to Israel’s campaign in the Gaza Strip to eradicate the organization that perpetrated the atrocities committed in Jewish communities in southern Israel on Oct. 7 is to turn history on its head. Pretending that it is the Jews who are today’s Nazis, rather than Hamas and its Palestinian supporters, is a big lie. It is the Palestinians of Hamas who are the contemporary torch-bearers for Adolf Hitler’s plans for the genocide of the Jewish people, as made explicit in their charter and all of their propaganda, which seeks Israel’s destruction and the slaughter of its population. This sort of inversion tactic is—as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s working definition of the term makes plain—textbook antisemitism.
As Seth Mandel tweeted last night:
Jonathan Glazer made a movie about a man who builds his own professional success on his ability to ignore the suffering of the Jews around him.
The man is immune to irony.
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) March 11, 2024
At the PJM Mothership, Rabbi Michael Barclay adds: The Academy Awards Are Again on the Wrong Side of History… and Boring!
Actors and filmmakers really should stick to their craft: fantasy and make-believe. Every time these imbeciles leave their overpaid fantasy world, they demonstrate their complete lack of understanding of reality. And they did it again at this year’s Academy Awards; which has a sordid history of being a soapbox for self-indulgent narcissists to show their consistent hubris and foolishness.
This year, the director of [Zone of Interest, which won best international feature], Jonathan Glazer, most demonstrated the insanity when he spoke for his partners and said, “We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness in a holocaust being hijacked by an occupation.” Clearly, they refuted being Jewish long ago and are painfully unaware of the irony of the statement: had they been in one of the areas attacked by Hamas, they would now be dead or hostages.
And Glazer seems oblivious to the fact that close to 90% of Gazans still support the horrors of October 7 and the charter of Hamas, which calls for the “obliteration” of all Jews, as well as anyone who doesn’t support their fanatical brand of Islam. But hey, it’s the Oscars and a time for film people to show their stupidity.
Some of the attendees demonstrated just that quite proudly:
See those red hand pins that certain people were wearing at the Oscars..? It symbolizes one of the most egregious and barbaric Palestinian terror attacks prior to October 7: https://t.co/MqPj7MG37t
— Michael Dickson (@michaeldickson) March 11, 2024
V’GER: JPL’s Voyager team ‘extremely hopeful’ after ailing, faraway craft shows signs of former self.
The elderly spacecraft has been speaking in gibberish since November 2023, and the Voyager engineering team has yet to fix the problem. As though a stroke left Voyager 1 with aphasia, it can hear the messages being sent from Earth but can’t respond coherently, providing no information on its health or status.
The issue likely lies in the flight data system (FDS), which compiles information about the spacecraft’s health, operational status and scientific observations into a string of 1’s and 0’s that are sent to Earth. Until recently, Voyager 1 had been transmitting a repetitive string of nonsense, indicating that the FDS may be “stuck”.
Without restoring communication, the Voyager team cannot tell what the probe needs to stay alive; consigning Voyager 1 to a lonely, unknowable demise.
“The likely cause of the issue is some type of corrupted bit structure in the FDS computer. We don’t know where that corruption is,” explained Dr. Suzanne Dodd, project manager for the Voyager Interstellar Mission, who describes this issue as the most serious she’s seen since joining the team in 2010.
In the past couple of weeks, Voyager 1 has shown promising signs of improvement. The probe is finally transmitting patterns of 1’s and 0’s that look familiar to the engineers.
Previously: “The problem was, the gibberish was coming from the flight direction software — something like an operating system. And no copy of that operating system remained in existence on Earth.”
Or maybe its knowledge has reached the limits of this universe and it must evolve.
HIDDEN J6 TESTIMONY REVEALED: The Epoch Times’s Zachary Steiber’s report raises two huge questions regarding the events leading up to the January 6, 2021, riot:
Question 1: Why did the Democrats January 6 select committee claim it “found no evidence” that then-President Donald Trump offered to get 10,000 National Guard troops for the Mayor of D.C. when the committee heard direct testimony that Trump did make that offer and it was rejected?
Question 2: Does this evidence that the Democrats January 6 select committee hid from the American public tell us why Trump has never been charged with inciting insurrection????
READER FAVORITE: FLANCCI Mens Slim Wallet with Money Clip. #CommissionEarned
THREE KINDS OF LIES: There are lies, damned lies and Biden’s statistics. Exhibit A from his recent State of the Onion, according to Issues & Insights (I&I), is his claim that the richest Americans pay on average a net tax of 8.2 percent. What??? Biden should have asked his IRS:
“It calculates the actual tax rate that various income groups pay, including the ultra-rich. Its data show that the 400 people with the biggest incomes in America were paying an average tax rate of more than 23 percent. Congress’ Joint Committee on Taxation figures that the tax rate on the top 0.4 percent of families is 26 percent,” I&I explains.
“So where does Biden come up with an 8.2 percent tax rate? He changes the definition of taxable income to include all unrealized gains from investments. If you have money in the stock market, any gains in the value of those stocks would count as income to Biden, even if you don’t sell the stock. Presumably so would any gains in the value of your home. Or the value of any other assets you possess.”
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Lindsey Graham: Biden has ‘screwed the world up every way you can.’ “If there’s ever an election in the history of America that deserves a debate between two candidates, it’s this election.”