DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Sickening ‘Wanted’ Posters Targeting Corporate Execs Pop Up Across NYC.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
December 12, 2024
HILLARITY ENSUED: What Happened When Oxford Anti-Semites Were Exposed to Facts.
The point here is not just the behavior of anti-Israel maniacs at the union or the fact that Sacerdoti, representative of the pro-Israel side of the public debate more broadly, showed grace and respect while standing his ground. It’s that the parts that drove the crowd to the brink of insanity were merely Sacerdoti’s reciting of statistics—i.e., facts. The mob’s contact with reality produced a chemical reaction that ought to be studied for decades to come.
About eight minutes in, Sacerdoti notes, in objection to the idea that Israel is purposely starving Gazans: “Israel has provided 700,000 tons of food to Gaza during this war. That is a daily average of 3,200 calories per person.”
To which a woman in the audience yelled: “You sick motherf***er!”
I don’t know if I’ve seen an exchange that so perfectly encapsulates the public debate over this Israel-Hamas war.
In the official Oxford Union video, you don’t get to hear that response at all. That is when the sound is cut out for 110 seconds, the length of time it takes the presiding official to regain order and allow Sacerdoti to continue.
This eruption was not caused by Sacerdoti saying something provocative or even delivering his opinion. It was his recital of statistics that sent the crowd into convulsions of fury.
You can watch the unedited video on X, naturally.
December 11, 2024
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Late-Night ‘Losers’ – Hollywood Reporter Mocks Colbert, Kimmel. “Far-Left site torches ‘self-righteous’ hosts in wake of Trump’s victory.”
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Will Democrats Allow Illegal Alien Criminals To Be Deported? “The Law and Order issue is one that has bit Democrats on the ass again and again, from the 1988 Presidential race to the 1993 New York City mayoral race to a whole lot of 2024 DA races. Slightly saner Democrats like New York City Mayor Eric Adams have recognized and changed course on illegal alien criminal deportations. But while the radical left, Democrat/Soros-backed soft-on-crime policies are deeply unpopular with the American electorate as a whole, they’re still a key tenant of the poisonous woke ideology that animates the ideological core of the Democratic Party.”
PARTISAN POLITICIZED FLAG OFFICERS OUGHT TO BE STRIPPED OF THEIR STARS AND THEIR PENSIONS: WATCH: Sen. Kennedy Humiliates General Who Called Trump Supporters ‘Fascists.’
THE NEW SPACE RACE: In a not-so-subtle signal to regulators, Blue Origin says New Glenn is ready.
Blue Origin said Tuesday that the test payload for the first launch of its new rocket, New Glenn, is ready for liftoff. The company published an image of the “Blue Ring” pathfinder nestled up against one half of the rocket’s payload fairing.
“There is a growing demand to quickly move and position equipment and infrastructure in multiple orbits,” the company’s chief executive, Dave Limp, said on LinkedIn. “Blue Ring has advanced propulsion and communication capabilities for government and commercial customers to handle these maneuvers precisely and efficiently.”
This week’s announcement—historically Blue Origin has been tight-lipped about new products, but is opening up more as it nears the debut of its flagship New Glenn rocket—appears to serve a couple of purposes.
First of all, the relatively small payload contrasted with the size of the payload fairing highlights the greater volume the rocket offers over most conventional boosters. New Glenn’s payload fairing is 7 meters (23 feet) in diameter as opposed to the more conventional 5 meters (16.4 feet). It looks roomy inside.
Additionally, the company appears to be publicly signaling the Federal Aviation Administration and other regulatory agencies that it believes New Glenn is ready to fly, pending approval to conduct a hot fire test at Launch Complex-36, and then for a liftoff from Florida. This is a not-so-subtle message to regulators to please hurry up and complete the paperwork necessary for launch activities. It is not clear what is holding up the hot-fire and launch approval in this case, but it is often environmental issues or certification of a flight termination system.
“Get the hell out of my way!” the wise man once said.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Today in the Great Democrat Civil War…
WELL, BYE:
🚨 #BREAKING: FBI Director Christopher Wray has just RESIGNED, per Fox News
GOOD RIDDANCE, you corrupt fool. pic.twitter.com/kI8Cc5Zm6w
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) December 11, 2024
UNEXPECTEDLY: Never Trump Lincoln Project paid millions in 2024 to companies owned by its leaders.
Dubbed in Esquire one day after the election as “the most useless people in America,” the Lincoln Project raised $15.5 million and burned through $16.2 million this year. The organization limped out of this cycle with more than $630,000 in unpaid invoices, largely in connection to limited liability corporations tied to Lincoln Project personnel, records show.
Since last January, the Lincoln Project has paid $2.1 million to Lever Communications, the media agency of its senior adviser, Joe Trippi. The funds were earmarked for digital ads and other consulting services.
In that timeframe, the Lincoln Project also dished out $1.5 million to Third Act Media, which counts Lincoln Project creative adviser Ben Howe as a staff member.
There was $934,000 from the Lincoln Project’s war chest set aside for Wilson’s Intrepid Media for “political strategy consulting,” “strategic consulting,” “equipment,” and “travel,” according to records. Summit Strategic, and the firm’s leader, Lincoln Project co-founder Reed Galen, scooped up $758,500 from the Lincoln Project.
Lincoln Project adviser Stuart Stevens’s Message Mountain firm came away this election with $535,000 for “political strategy consulting,” according to financial disclosures. Lincoln Project senior adviser Trygve Olseon’s Viking Strategies was paid $435,000, largely for “communications consulting,” while another senior PAC adviser, Jeff Timmer, saw $387,000 paid to Two Rivers Public Affairs — in which Timmer is a partner.
Nice work if you can stomach it.
DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: Safeway to close struggling S.F. location over concerns about customer safety, theft. “Safeway announced on Tuesday that it would close its Webster Street supermarket on Feb. 7, a blow to San Francisco’s Fillmore and Japantown neighborhoods that have pushed to convince the grocery chain to keep the struggling store open.”
I used to shop at that Safeway 30 years ago and it wasn’t exactly new then.
FORCE-FED THE RED PILL:
Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) says he attended “absolutely horrifying” meetings where Biden’s government vowed to take “complete control” over AI technology:
“They basically said AI is going to be a game of 2 or 3 big companies working closely with the government… We’re going to… pic.twitter.com/REjkfgJkyV
— Honestly with Bari Weiss (@thehonestlypod) December 10, 2024
More:
[Bari Weiss]
What was their argument?[Marc Andreessen]
Why would- Well, it’s more, so this gets into this whole, all these debates around AI safety, AI policy. So there’s sort of several dimensions on it, and I’ll do my best to Steel Man it. So one is just to the extent that this stuff is relevant to the military, which it is, if you draw an analogy between AI and autonomous weapons being the new thing that’s going to determine who wins and loses wars, then you draw an analogy to the, in the Cold War, that was nuclear energy, that was nuclear power, and that was the atomic bomb.And the federal government, the Steel Man would be the federal government didn’t let startups go out and build atomic bombs, right? You had the Manhattan Project and everything was classified, and at least according to them, they classified down to the level of actual mathematics, and they tightly controlled everything and that, and look, that determined a lot of the shape of the world, right? And so there’s that, and then look, there’s the other, that’s part one, and then look, I think part two is there’s the social control aspect to it, which is where the censorship stuff comes right back, which is the exact same dynamic we’ve had with social media censorship and how it’s basically been weaponized and how the government became entwined with social media censorship, which was one of the real scandals of the last decade, and a real problem, like a real constitutional problem, like that is happening at like hyperspeed and AI. And these are the same people who have been using social media censorship against their political enemies.
These are the same people who have been doing debanking against their political enemies, and they basically, I think they want to use AI the same way.
Statists fear what might happen if they don’t have a monopoly on AI which is exactly why they can’t be allowed to have a monopoly on AI.
TODAY IN WAR AND OTHER ABSURDITIES: Putin Doesn’t Stand a Goat of a Chance Without North Korea. “What’s the value of a single North Korean soldier? Would you believe it’s approximately one percent of a goat?”
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:
Capitol Police has arrested 33-year-old James McIntyre of Illinois after the alleged assault of Rep. @NancyMace on Tuesday.
McIntyre is facing a charge for Assaulting a Government Official according to Capitol Police.
The incident happened shortly before 6 pm in Rayburn. https://t.co/UqvCViMXK9
— Beatrice Peterson (@MissBeaE on all platforms) (@MissBeaE) December 11, 2024
X seems to be the only place where a hate-motivated assault on a serving congresswoman is getting much attention.
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
All you have to do is get rid of the commie Left in every country to fix everything fast. https://t.co/jzJkUkfCJs
— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) December 11, 2024
For comparison, core inflation in this country is 2.8% — but maybe the DOGE boys can help with that.
CORRECTION: I missed that 2.7% is Argentina’s *monthly* inflation rate — big difference, and I apologize for the error. Still, our official core inflation rate is manipulated all out of reality, too.
BEEGE WELBORN: Has Winken Blinken Actually Met the New Boss?
Over and over again, the cluelessness of the Biden administration has people’s heads shaking, hitting desks, or simply thrown back in disgusted astonishment.
TELL ME HE DIDN’T SAY THAT
Their complete inability to grasp any given situation was on display again yesterday as our diffident and generally incompetent Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, wandered out to a podium to mumble a few words on the state of the insurgency that had just conquered Syria.
I don’t know what I was expecting from this misbegotten spore off the old White House mushroom, but it most assuredly wasn’t what came out of this idiot’s mouth.
TELL ME HE DIDN’T SAY THAT
Oh, but he did.
God bless America. How many days are left…?
What sort of deluded fool tells the world that the United States thinks it’s a wonderful thing to should be celebrated that, however gratifying it is to see a vile, barbarous dictator meet an ignominious end, that having a radical Islamic terrorist group doing the usurping is somehow ‘better’?
To be fair, the Obama crowd that runs this administration has always had a soft spot for Islamists.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: I Hope Trump Isn’t Planning On Much Bipartisanship Next Year. “One doesn’t have to look long or far to find evidence of the American Left’s emotional unwellness.”
CHARLES HUGH SMITH: Grey Swans Are Circling. “A grey swan is an event that is known and possible to happen, but which is assumed to be unlikely to occur. The term derives from Nassim Taleb’s black swan theory, which describes an event that is unlikely but unknown.”
More:
Equally interesting is the mass of propaganda being spewed to cover up the systemic vulnerabilities that might have played a role in the Syrian regime’s collapse. The tsunami of propaganda is intended to bolster the everything is forever narrative, but the enormity and virulence of the propaganda effort suggests the opposite: extreme vulnerability and fear of other regimes that they could be next.
Discussions of what triggered the Western Roman Empire’s collapse shed some light on the ease of embracing an interpretation that misses the mark. Gibbon concluded that Christianity undermined Rome’s coherence; others view Christianity as the alternative structure that enabled Europe to maintain critical coherence in the centuries after Western Rome fell. (The Eastern Roman Empire–the Byzantine Empire–had a different set of circumstances and endured in truncated form for almost a thousand years after Rome fell.)
Moral and social decay are often listed as causal factors, but dismissed by those who see the increasingly capable Barbarian armies as the cause of Rome’s collapse. Others have widened the narrative from war and internal decay to climate change and the ravages of pandemics.
The relevance of all these factors leads to a diagnosis of polycrisis–the collapse cannot be attributed to any one factor but to the confluence of many factors, each of which undermined the status quo’s moral, financial and material bases which fatally destabilized the coherence of the regime’s military and political responses.
From the perspective of polycrisis, the collapse of Syria’s regime could be a harbinger of future collapses, not a one-off event. The reason for this is that many of the keystone/linchpin elements of polycrisis are visibly global in nature: they affect every region and nation-state, regardless of size or location.
As Glenn noted in yesterday’s substack, “one of the virtues of democracy is that it shakes things up, and allows preference cascades that don’t require leaders to be beheaded and masses to be slaughtered.”
Indeed.
One of the less obvious blessings of Trump’s election win last month is that (unlike in 2020) the country’s pressure valve was allowed to function as designed — no gray swans (much less beheadings or slaughters needed) to oust the Democrats. Even better for keeping the gray swans at bay, Trump is serious about undoing the damage done.
Authoritarian regimes like Russia, China, and particularly Iran appear strong right up until the gray swans start circling.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY (NATO VS NATO, SYRIA VS SYRIA EDITION):
There’s a battle currently raging in Syria that’s receiving less attention — it’s between:
The US backed Kurdish SDF – The Syrian Democratic Forces 🇺🇸
Vs.
The Turkish backed Islamist SNA – The Syrian National Army 🇹🇷Currently, the SNA holds the upper hand, as they recently… pic.twitter.com/RUqKG0Vyjd
— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) December 10, 2024
Related:
Much has changed in the Middle East in the last two weeks except it seems that not much has changed.