Two of my favorite people on the world stage sit down and interview each other: Candace Owens and Nigel Farage. You will learn a lot you may not have known, especially about Mr. Farage.
https://www.prageru.com/video/the-candace-owens-show-nigel-farage/
Sunday, June 30, 2019
Golden Age, or Golden Era?
Trump tweets to the North Korean dictator, "Hey, let's get together at the DMZ!" Trump has reasonably good relationships with Putin, Xi, and Kim Jong Un."
Scott says the most natural allies of the U.S. are Russia and China because we are the three big powers. An agreement with Russia and China and the U.S. on saving money on nuclear weapons makes sense (spend only a half of trillion each, instead of a trillion!
Trump's new press secretary, Stephanie Griffin, "went in hard" to enable the media to get a good picture of Kim and Trump.
Portland is a NoGo zone. Andy Ngo, a Quillette reporter, covered an Antifa protest. They attacked him and he is in the hospital with brain damage. They are adding quick-drying cement to the milkshakes. The Portland police allow Antifa to wear masks. Is that a city you want to visit? Not Scott.
One viewer was mad that Scott talked to Alex Jones. Scott explains, "My brand is talking to anyone!" You don't want to be branded by who you talk to. "Contact is good!" Trump visits North Korea and Kim becomes easier to deal with.
Lindsey Graham thinks Kamala Harris is a force to be reckoned with. None of the Dems will compete with President Trump.
Scott believes a settlement with Iran is possible.
He believes the Dem race will come down to Warren vs. Harris. Elizabeth Warren will not win the nomination if she continues to wear the same spectacles she wears now!
Scott prefers no deal with China until they start executing Fentanyl dealers.
Scott says the most natural allies of the U.S. are Russia and China because we are the three big powers. An agreement with Russia and China and the U.S. on saving money on nuclear weapons makes sense (spend only a half of trillion each, instead of a trillion!
Trump's new press secretary, Stephanie Griffin, "went in hard" to enable the media to get a good picture of Kim and Trump.
Portland is a NoGo zone. Andy Ngo, a Quillette reporter, covered an Antifa protest. They attacked him and he is in the hospital with brain damage. They are adding quick-drying cement to the milkshakes. The Portland police allow Antifa to wear masks. Is that a city you want to visit? Not Scott.
One viewer was mad that Scott talked to Alex Jones. Scott explains, "My brand is talking to anyone!" You don't want to be branded by who you talk to. "Contact is good!" Trump visits North Korea and Kim becomes easier to deal with.
Lindsey Graham thinks Kamala Harris is a force to be reckoned with. None of the Dems will compete with President Trump.
Scott believes a settlement with Iran is possible.
He believes the Dem race will come down to Warren vs. Harris. Elizabeth Warren will not win the nomination if she continues to wear the same spectacles she wears now!
Scott prefers no deal with China until they start executing Fentanyl dealers.
Saturday, June 29, 2019
Thinking outside the box
One of many reasons Scott Adams is unique is because he doesn't believe facts, reasons, and policies make a difference in who we select to be our leaders! While there is no doubt that there is truth to that way of thinking, I find it irritating. The reason I spend so much time reading is I like to analyze facts, reasons, and policies! Scott lives in the persuasion realm, where people associate things irrationally. So if you can associate somebody with some bad character, you win. You pair things and then they take on the qualities of the other!
Scott thinks the anti-Trump media has made a huge mistake in quoting Jimmy Carter, a 95-year-old who is famous for being the worst president in modern history. Carter said Trump was elected because of Russian collusion. Who else is old and who else are people having doubts about his credibility? That's right, Joe Biden! Will people associate Biden with Carter? Not good for Biden!
When Scott learned hypnosis, he learned that people reveal their intentions by their choice of words. Biden says he is in the 2020 race because the USA is at a turning point. Biden said in an interview, "It doesn't mean I'm going to win. I hope I can make a contribution." Scott hears capitulation! People who haven't given up yet don't talk like that.
Scott says that the Democrats have become the hoax party. The Russia collusion hoax, the "fine people" hoax of Charlottesville, and Kamala Harris's assertion that Joe Biden praised segregationists. Then there is the climate change prediction models hoax, which Scott does not yet call a hoax, but many of the rest of us think it is!
Scott follows Bill Polte on Twitter. Polte is interested in cleaning up areas that are blighted.
President Trump is getting criticized for inviting Kim Jon Un to meet him somewhere such as at the DMZ while Trump is in the neighborhood. Scott believes Trump is setting a standard of warmth that future presidents will struggle to imitate. First Kim and Trump need to sell each other on a plan. The deal is the relationship! Second, they each need to sell their own nations. Trump has established productive relationships with Russia, China, and North Korea! Who else has done that?
Trump has also required drug companies to list their prices. What other president is this strong, brave, or determined?
Do you think President Trump could maintain friendly relations with Putin but then stab him in the back if Putin tried to do something that would hurt America? Scott says, "You know he could!" Trump also expressed dismay that we trade so little with Russia. Don't you feel safer about China, knowing that we have so much trade with them?
One way to turn an acquaintance into a friend is to share a secret with them. Trump's casual invitation to Kim Jong Un to meet at the DMZ is similar to this concept.
Kamala Harris is not African American. She is Indian-Jamaican-American. One part of her family tree was actually a slave owner.
Scott thinks Andrew Yang is very likeable. Yang said, "running for president makes the world seem like a simulation." Is reality a simulation?
What if we gave a free smartphone and free minutes to every illegal immigrant? The government would put an app on there telling them about employers who are hiring, it would do language translations and actually teach English, someone could list themselves as willing to share their home with illegals, employers can only pay them through the app (so they would have to pay taxes), the government takes some money, and they can be tracked!
Scott thinks the anti-Trump media has made a huge mistake in quoting Jimmy Carter, a 95-year-old who is famous for being the worst president in modern history. Carter said Trump was elected because of Russian collusion. Who else is old and who else are people having doubts about his credibility? That's right, Joe Biden! Will people associate Biden with Carter? Not good for Biden!
When Scott learned hypnosis, he learned that people reveal their intentions by their choice of words. Biden says he is in the 2020 race because the USA is at a turning point. Biden said in an interview, "It doesn't mean I'm going to win. I hope I can make a contribution." Scott hears capitulation! People who haven't given up yet don't talk like that.
Scott says that the Democrats have become the hoax party. The Russia collusion hoax, the "fine people" hoax of Charlottesville, and Kamala Harris's assertion that Joe Biden praised segregationists. Then there is the climate change prediction models hoax, which Scott does not yet call a hoax, but many of the rest of us think it is!
Scott follows Bill Polte on Twitter. Polte is interested in cleaning up areas that are blighted.
President Trump is getting criticized for inviting Kim Jon Un to meet him somewhere such as at the DMZ while Trump is in the neighborhood. Scott believes Trump is setting a standard of warmth that future presidents will struggle to imitate. First Kim and Trump need to sell each other on a plan. The deal is the relationship! Second, they each need to sell their own nations. Trump has established productive relationships with Russia, China, and North Korea! Who else has done that?
Trump has also required drug companies to list their prices. What other president is this strong, brave, or determined?
Do you think President Trump could maintain friendly relations with Putin but then stab him in the back if Putin tried to do something that would hurt America? Scott says, "You know he could!" Trump also expressed dismay that we trade so little with Russia. Don't you feel safer about China, knowing that we have so much trade with them?
One way to turn an acquaintance into a friend is to share a secret with them. Trump's casual invitation to Kim Jong Un to meet at the DMZ is similar to this concept.
Kamala Harris is not African American. She is Indian-Jamaican-American. One part of her family tree was actually a slave owner.
Scott thinks Andrew Yang is very likeable. Yang said, "running for president makes the world seem like a simulation." Is reality a simulation?
What if we gave a free smartphone and free minutes to every illegal immigrant? The government would put an app on there telling them about employers who are hiring, it would do language translations and actually teach English, someone could list themselves as willing to share their home with illegals, employers can only pay them through the app (so they would have to pay taxes), the government takes some money, and they can be tracked!
Life in Espanola, New Mexico
I am driving into Santa Fe (45 minutes) for daily cancer radiation treatments. On the door of the Cancer Center they have a big sign which I will try to remember to take a picture of when I go in for Monday's treatment. It says it is a gun free zone and it also mentions no knives and I can't remember what else. Isn't that the dumbest thing you have heard of?
My mechanic told me that the town where I live, Espanola, New Mexico, is the heroin capital of the United States. It is a crossroads of major thoroughfares going in all directions. While working out at the gym, I heard the janitor talking on the phone, telling someone he is doing Community Service. Of course, when he hung up, Bob the blogger had to inquire of the man as to why he was doing community service. He told me that he started doing heroin at age twelve and continued for thirteen years, living homeless on the streets. He was arrested for armed robbery. He hastened to add, "Not a bank, but I should have." Instead, he robbed his drug dealer. He has been serving nine years at various New Mexico prisons and just got out. Why various prisons? Because he got into fights. Now he is a very friendly guy with a girlfriend, house, job, and faith in a "higher power." Please include him in your prayers.
After the gym, I drove to Walmart. There is a homeless man who helps people push their carts in the parking lot. He also brings carts back to their reserved areas. A few days ago I had given him the number of a Christian Outreach program in Western New Mexico. He called the number I gave him but they had no vacancies. Today his right eye was all puffed up and closed shut because someone jumped him last night and took all the money he had been saving for a week. I offered to take him to a hospital, but he did not want to go. I gave him some money and bought him a Coke and told him I would call the Christian Outreach people. I did, but there was no answer so I left a message on their voice mail. Please keep this man in your prayers. He is a really hard worker. He doesn't have a job because he has no I.D. of any kind. He says he was born in Albuquerque and was adopted at an early age. He says he was "kicked out" at age thirteen and has been living on the street for the last twenty years.
My mechanic told me that the town where I live, Espanola, New Mexico, is the heroin capital of the United States. It is a crossroads of major thoroughfares going in all directions. While working out at the gym, I heard the janitor talking on the phone, telling someone he is doing Community Service. Of course, when he hung up, Bob the blogger had to inquire of the man as to why he was doing community service. He told me that he started doing heroin at age twelve and continued for thirteen years, living homeless on the streets. He was arrested for armed robbery. He hastened to add, "Not a bank, but I should have." Instead, he robbed his drug dealer. He has been serving nine years at various New Mexico prisons and just got out. Why various prisons? Because he got into fights. Now he is a very friendly guy with a girlfriend, house, job, and faith in a "higher power." Please include him in your prayers.
After the gym, I drove to Walmart. There is a homeless man who helps people push their carts in the parking lot. He also brings carts back to their reserved areas. A few days ago I had given him the number of a Christian Outreach program in Western New Mexico. He called the number I gave him but they had no vacancies. Today his right eye was all puffed up and closed shut because someone jumped him last night and took all the money he had been saving for a week. I offered to take him to a hospital, but he did not want to go. I gave him some money and bought him a Coke and told him I would call the Christian Outreach people. I did, but there was no answer so I left a message on their voice mail. Please keep this man in your prayers. He is a really hard worker. He doesn't have a job because he has no I.D. of any kind. He says he was born in Albuquerque and was adopted at an early age. He says he was "kicked out" at age thirteen and has been living on the street for the last twenty years.
Friday, June 28, 2019
Did she sleep through her legal ethics courses?
In USA Today Glenn Reynolds wrote about a California prosecutor who lied and falsified evidence. Kamala Harris was then the California Attorney General. Incredibly, she decided to appeal the case (she lost).
Harris's key argument: That putting a fake confession in the transcript wasn't "outrageous" because it didn't involve physical brutality, like chaining someone to a radiator and beating him with a hose.Read more here.
Well, no. It just involved an officer of the court knowingly producing a fraudulent document in order to secure an illicit advantage. If Harris really thinks that knowingly producing a fraudulent document to secure an illicit advantage isn't "outrageous," then perhaps she slept through her legal ethics courses.
Wallace wins the first debate and Harris wins the second
One year ago Scott predicted that Kamala Harris would be the Democratic nominee. He thinks she won last night's debate. Elizabeth Warren won the night before. "It is now impossible for a man to win the Democratic nomination."
Bernie is going to fall away and so will Biden.
There is a "Predict It" website where you can place some bets. Scott has place some bets based on persuasion.
He bet Kamala Harris would be the Dem nominee although Warren looks strong. Kamala shut down all of the other Democrats when she said the voters want to see food on the table, not a food fight. She mischaracterized Biden's history on segregation. His response was weak and ended when he said his time was up.
Biden doesn't look up to it. Not working on all cylinders. No chance to be president.
Scott gives credit to Hillary for breaking the glass ceiling. Almost no one in the media is even mentioning the fact that in each of the first two debates a woman won. No one talks about a minority ethnicity as a negative nor do we talk about anyone's gender as a negative.
Swalwell frozen face. Botox?
Yang has never run for public office, but is doing well. He doesn't come across as a politician.
Trump seems to be on very friendly terms with many other world leaders.
Bernie is going to fall away and so will Biden.
There is a "Predict It" website where you can place some bets. Scott has place some bets based on persuasion.
He bet Kamala Harris would be the Dem nominee although Warren looks strong. Kamala shut down all of the other Democrats when she said the voters want to see food on the table, not a food fight. She mischaracterized Biden's history on segregation. His response was weak and ended when he said his time was up.
Biden doesn't look up to it. Not working on all cylinders. No chance to be president.
Scott gives credit to Hillary for breaking the glass ceiling. Almost no one in the media is even mentioning the fact that in each of the first two debates a woman won. No one talks about a minority ethnicity as a negative nor do we talk about anyone's gender as a negative.
Swalwell frozen face. Botox?
Yang has never run for public office, but is doing well. He doesn't come across as a politician.
Trump seems to be on very friendly terms with many other world leaders.
Trump won the debates!
All Democrats just raised their hands for giving millions of illegal aliens unlimited healthcare. How about taking care of American Citizens first!? That’s the end of that race!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 28, 2019
They all raised their hands!
All Democrats just raised their hands for giving millions of illegal aliens unlimited healthcare. How about taking care of American Citizens first!? That’s the end of that race!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 28, 2019
He canceled Amazon Prime. Then Alexa called him a "shithead."
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/9390172/alexa-insults-man-cancelled-amazon-prime-subscription/
The Pentagon has a device that can identify people without seeing their face!
Mark Frauenfelder reports in BoingBoing,
If you think your V is for Vendetta mask will hide your identity, think again. The Pentagon has a laser device that "can pick up on a unique cardiac signature from 200 meters away, even through clothes," reports MIT Technology Review.
A new device, developed for the Pentagon after US Special Forces requested it, can identify people without seeing their face: instead it detects their unique cardiac signature with an infrared laser. While it works at 200 meters (219 yards), longer distances could be possible with a better laser. “I don’t want to say you could do it from space,” says Steward Remaly, of the Pentagon’s Combatting Terrorism Technical Support Office, “but longer ranges should be possible.”
Thursday, June 27, 2019
Which Dem candidates did best persuasion-wise?
Perhaps you know that persuasion expert Scott Adams predicted in October 2015 that Donald Trump would win the presidential election. Therefore, it behooves us to listen to him comment on the current crop of candidates, starting with his impressions from last night's Democratic debates.
"DeBlasio performed well, but Scott does not think he has much of a chance.
Corey Booker doesn't connect. He pretends to care. That wide-eyed look just screams insincere!
Scott thought that Elizabeth Warren won the night easily. Her performance looked powerful, credible, confident, smart, passionate, and in control.
Julian Castro got a lot of attention, but he has a problem with his physical size, and he will not be the nominee.
Klobuchar seems reasonable, but she is not telegenic.
O'Rourke was an empty suit.
Tulsi Gabbard won the Drudge poll. No matter what the question is, she has one answer: I served in the military. She looked lifeless."
Go here to watch much more.
"DeBlasio performed well, but Scott does not think he has much of a chance.
Corey Booker doesn't connect. He pretends to care. That wide-eyed look just screams insincere!
Scott thought that Elizabeth Warren won the night easily. Her performance looked powerful, credible, confident, smart, passionate, and in control.
Julian Castro got a lot of attention, but he has a problem with his physical size, and he will not be the nominee.
Klobuchar seems reasonable, but she is not telegenic.
O'Rourke was an empty suit.
Tulsi Gabbard won the Drudge poll. No matter what the question is, she has one answer: I served in the military. She looked lifeless."
Go here to watch much more.
CRUZ: "Well I think these questions, these documents raise very serious questions about political bias."
Project Veritas makes available a partial transcript of Ted Cruz asking questions in a Senate Hearing on June 25. Senator Cruz questioned Ms. Maggie Stanphill, Director of Google User Experience over the findings of Project Veritas’ recent investigative report featuring insider testimony, undercover video of a Google executive, and leaked internal documents.
CRUZ: Are you familiar with the report that was released yesterday from Veritas, that included a whistleblower from within Google that included videos from a senior executive at Google, and it included documents that are reportedly internal powerpoint documents from Google.
GOOGLE: Yes I heard about that report in the news.
CRUZ: Have you seen the report?
GOOGLE: No I did not.
CRUZ: So you didn’t review the report to prepare for this meeting?
GOOGLE: It’s been a busy day and I have a day job which is Digital Well-being at Google so I’m trying to make sure…
CRUZ: Well I’m sorry that this meeting is impinging on your day job.
GOOGLE: It’s a great opportunity thank you.
CRUZ: One of the things in that report and I would recommend people interested in political bias at Google watch the entire report and judge for themselves, there’s a video from a woman Jen Gennai, it’s a secret video that was recorded, Jen Gennai, as I understand, is the head of responsible innovation for google. Are you familiar with Miss Gennai?
GOOGLE: I work in user experience and I believe that the AI group is somebody that works on AI principles. But it’s a big company and I don’t work directly with Jen.
CRUZ: Do you know her or no?
GOOGLE: I do not know Jen.
CRUZ: As I understand that she is shown in the video saying, and this is a quote, “Elizabeth Warren is saying that we should break up Google. And like I love her, but she is very misguided. Like that will not make it better. It will make it worse. Because all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do, will be charged with preventing the next trump situation. It’s like a small company cannot do that.” Do you think its Google’s job to quote, “prevent the next trump situation?”
GOOGLE: Thank you, senator. I don’t agree with that. No sir.
CRUZ: So a different individual, a whistleblower identified simply as an insider at Google with knowledge of the algorithm, was quoted on the same report as saying, Google is quote “bent on never letting someone like Donald Trump come to power again.” You think its google’s job to make sure quote “somebody like Donald Trump never comes to power again?”
GOOGLE: No sir I don’t think that is Google’s job and we build for everyone including every single religious belief, every single demographic, every single region, and certainly every single political affiliation.
CRUZ: Well I have to say that certainly doesn’t appear to be the case. Of the senior executives at Google, do you know a single one that voted for Donald Trump?
GOOGLE: Thank you, senator. I’m a user experience director and I work on google digital well-being, I can tell you we have diverse use…
CRUZ: Did you know of anyone that voted for Trump.
GOOGLE: I definitely know of people that voted for Trump.
CRUZ: Of the senior executives at Google.
GOOGLE: I don’t talk politics with my workmates.
CRUZ: Is that a no?
GOOGLE: Sorry is that a no to what?
CRUZ: Do you know any senior executives, even a single senior executive at the company that voted for Donald Trump?
GOOGLE: as the digital well-being expert I don’t think this is in my purview to comment… I definitely don’t know…
…
CRUZ: Let’s talk about one of the PowerPoints that was leaked. The Veritas report has Google internally saying “I propose we make machine learning intentionally human-centered and intervene for fairness.” Is this document accurate?
GOOGLE: Thank you, sir, I don’t know about this document so I don’t know.
CRUZ: Okay I’m going to ask you to respond to the committee in writing afterward as to whether this PowerPoint and the other documents are included in the Veritas report, whether those are accurate. And I recognize that your lawyers may want to write an explanation, you’re welcome to write all the explanation that you want but I also want a simple clear answer is this an accurate document that was generated by Google. Do you agree with the sentiment expressed in this document?
GOOGLE: No sir I do not.
CRUZ: Going to read you another, also in this report, it indicates that Google according to this whistleblower, deliberately makes recommendations if someone is searching for conservative commentators, deliberately shifts the recommendations so instead of recommending other conservative commentators it recommends organizations like CNN or MSNBC or left-leaning political outlets. Is that occurring?
GOOGLE: Thank you, sir, I can’t comment on search algorithms or recommendations given my purview as Digital Well-being lead. I can take that back to my team though.
CRUZ: So is it part of Digital Well-being for search recommendations to reflect the where a user wants to go than deliberately shifting where they want to go?
GOOGLE: As a user experience professional, we focus on delivering on user goals. So we try to get out of the way and on the task at hand.
CRUZ: So a final question, one of these documents that were leaked explains what Google is doing and it has a series of stamps, training data, collected and classified, algorithms are programmed, media are filtered ranked and aggregated, and that ends with, people, parenthesis, like us, are programmed. Does Google view its job as programming people with search results?
GOOGLE: Thank you, senator. I can’t speak for the whole entire company, but I can tell you that we make sure that we put our users first in design.
CRUZ: Well I think these questions, these documents raise very serious questions about political bias.
Weakness to be exploited, or magnanimity to be reciprocated.?
Victor Davis Hanson writes in American Greatness, about the U.S. vs. Iran.
...The charge of Trump being an appeaser was strange coming from leftist critics, especially given Trump’s past readiness to bomb Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for allegedly using chemical weapons, his willingness to destroy ISIS through enhanced air strikes, and his liberation of American forces in Afghanistan from prior confining rules of engagement.Read more here.
...Antiwar critics of Trump’s Jacksonian rhetoric turned on a dime to blast him as a weak, vacillating leader afraid to call Iran to account.
Trump supporters countered that the president had shown Iran a final gesture of patience—and cleared the way for a stronger retaliation should Iran foolishly interpret his one-time forbearance as weakness to be exploited rather than as magnanimity to be reciprocated.
...The U.S. no longer believes in nation-building the autocratic Middle East into Western-style democracies. American troops are not in jeopardy from Iranian ground attacks. Americans have no financial or psychological capital invested in liberalizing Iraq, much less Iran and its environs.
Nor is the situation like the chronic Iranian tensions of the last 40 years in which an oil-dependent U.S. feared Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, or the sudden cutoff of imported oil, ensuring Nixon-era gas lines.
America is now the largest producer of gas and oil in the world, soon to be the largest exporter as well. The U.S. economy is booming. Iran’s is imploding.
...How, then, can the U.S. deter Iranian escalation without getting into an unpopular war before the heated 2020 election? It merely needs to persist in the present standoff: Ramp up the sanctions even tighter and ignore pathetic Iranian attacks on foreign ships.
If Tehran preemptively attacks an American ship or plane, it will be met by a disproportionate response, preferably one aimed not at civilian infrastructure but at the Iranian military hierarchy, Revolutionary Guard and theocratic elite.
Otherwise, the Trump administration can sit back and monitor Iran’s international ostracism and economic isolation while remaining unpredictable and enigmatic, ready to hit back hard at any attack on Americans but without being suckered into an optional war with Iran in the perennial Middle East quagmire.
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
Don't look at these photos
The Siberian Times reports,
Man lives after bear breaks his spine and keeps him as food inside the den.Read more here.
A video shows Alexander opening his blue eyes and confirming his first name.
It is as yet unclear if he was a hunter, too, and how his encounter with the bear happened.
He managed to explain that he was attacked and dragged inside the den when he broke his spine.
The attack happened approximately a month ago, Alexander said.
‘The bear preserved me as food for later’, he explained.
A video filmed inside the local hospital shows that the man turned into a ‘speaking mummy’ with his tissues rotting after laying motionless for so long.
Local medics say they cannot explain how the man survived such injuries.
The tyranny of small debts, compounded
Seth Godin writes in his blog,
The simple but hard to follow rule is this: Only borrow money to buy things that go up in value.Read more here.
In the old days, that meant a house and a college education, because you’d probably earn enough from either to pay back the debt, with interest. Today, housing is unpredictable and many forms of student debt are crushing (and the yield on the most expensive forms of education isn’t as high as it might be).
You can justify borrowing money to buy a car if the car enables you to make enough money to pay the debt back… But medallion cab owners in New York have recently learned that there are few sure things.
The deal with credit card debt, though is simply terrible. The credit card companies pay 2% on their interest-bearing accounts, but charge around NINE times that on the debt that some people carry–that’s a huge gap. It’s a lousy deal you should avoid if you possibly can, regardless of how unfair the economy is.
Lately, there’s been a lot of handwringing about the long-term impact of a daily treat like a cup of coffee. The Times got this completely wrong yesterday, pushing people deeper into a trap that they should run away from. And the Washington Post points out that the number of people getting a loan for their wedding is skyrocketing. This is a problem. Here’s a simple way to see why:
...The sad news is that the best you can do within an industrial system that makes it harder and harder to catch up through effort is to begin by avoiding debt. It turns out that paying interest on interest is a long-term trap.
The real win is to borrow money to embrace high-yield education, and then borrow money if you need it to build an asset, a business that creates value for you and the people you serve.
The system is not fair, and it’s rigged against those that get compounded.
Don’t get compounded if you can avoid it.
Tucker: "Republicans are sitting in a stupefied fog of libertarianism"
Ace of Spades reporting on social media coordination in censorship:
The nation's entire political discussion controlled -- controlled -- by a small group of people who all know each other and are all on the far left and in fact all live a mile from each other in the richest suburbs of San Francisco.
A bunch of soybottomed hard-left oligarchs and venture socialists having a hippie high tea meeting and deciding who the next president will be, and who has the right to speak in the public square.
Isn't that what America's really all about?
Google's Narc Newsletter
Ace of Spades has an important post today about Google's internal newsletter about microaggressions. Read it here, where he also links to a story in the Daily Caller.
Today's hearing on "Stifling Free Speech: Technological Censorship and the Public Discourse."
USA Today reports,
Republican lawmakers led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz threatened social media companies Wednesday with regulation, echoing repeated charges from President Donald Trump and other top GOP officials that Facebook, Google and Twitter target the political speech of right-leaning users to limit their online reach.Read more here.
At issue is the opaque process with which these companies make decisions on what's allowed and not allowed on their platforms.
"What makes the threat of political censorship so problematic is the lack of transparency, the invisibility, the ability for a handful of giant tech companies to decide if a particular speaker is disfavored," Cruz said in his opening remarks during Wednesday's contentious Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on "Stifling Free Speech: Technological Censorship and the Public Discourse."
Cruz said he'd consider charging "big tech" with antitrust violations or fraud or could remove the protection from liability provided by a decades-old federal law.
Do we have anyone better than Mark Steyn to question Mueller next month?
Why did the same people get hired to run both the investigation of Hillary Clinton and the Russian collusion investigation of Donald Trump? Mark Stein thinks he knows:
Today it was announced that Mueller is going to testify July 17 back-to-back in front of the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees.
Mark makes many other cogent points in this piece written in December of 2017!
The same people had to run both investigations because otherwise the new investigators would discover the shenanigans of the old investigators. Putting Strzok and Page on the team was the FBI's way of protecting itself.
Today it was announced that Mueller is going to testify July 17 back-to-back in front of the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees.
Mark makes many other cogent points in this piece written in December of 2017!
It begins
Maybe there is hope for free speech in America. Politico broke a story this morning that the White House is convening a "summit" on social media July 11.
The announcement came the same day Trump said the federal government should file lawsuits against some of the tech giants. The president has accused Google, Facebook and Twitter of being biased against him and other conservatives — a charge the companies have repeatedly denied.Read more here.
"Look, we should be suing Google and Facebook and all that, which, perhaps we will," Trump said during a phone interview on Fox Business.
Trump has suggested the internet companies may run afoul of federal antitrust laws and floated possible enforcement action against them. Earlier this month, he suggested U.S. regulators should levy massive fines against the tech giants, saying “obviously there is something going on in terms of monopoly” in the sector.
"What they did to me on Twitter’s incredible. I have millions and millions of followers, but I will tell you they make it very hard for people to join me on Twitter," he said. "If I announced tomorrow that I’m going to become a nice liberal Democrat, I would pick up five times more followers."
Tuesday, June 25, 2019
Libya, Syria, ISIS, Clinton, Obama
Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton: "Oh, yes, Benghazi is tied to Syria and the rise of ISIS!" Tom reads from a Defense Intelligence Agency document. The DIA was run by General Flynn! "No wonder Obama didn't like him!"
BIG ARMS SCANDAL: Smoking gun docs uncovered by @JudicialWatch show Obama/Clinton were aware arms going to Syria through Benghazi and were warned about rise of ISIS, and they were supporting terrorists in Syria. Obama/Clinton created Syria/Iran mess. https://t.co/2L30dJSmpn … pic.twitter.com/iPQYkX11YP
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) June 21, 2019
Additional sanctions against Iran
SECRETARY MNUCHIN: So I think, as you know, I just left the Oval Office, where President Trump signed a new executive order authorizing even more expanded sanctions against Iran. So now — along with our existing sanctions authority, we have additional sanctions to go after the Supreme Leader’s Office and lock up literally billions of dollars more of assets. Along with that action today, we are also announcing specific actions targeting those responsible for recent activities.
"We women love being hunted with a big ole club." "We need that!" "But you can go back and change the past!"
"We women love being hunted with a big ole club," E. Jean Carroll tells Charlie Rose, who is obviously getting turned on as he adds, "You love being chased. You want to be pursued." She agrees and adds, "Waking up without a boyfriend is one of the worst things!"
"You can go back and change the past!" "The truth is, their whole lives are distraught, unless they have a man!"
"You can go back and change the past!" "The truth is, their whole lives are distraught, unless they have a man!"
President Obama’s surveillance network
Sundance writes in the Conservative Treehouse,
One of the reasons why the Flynn legal situation is so interesting is not really because of Flynn himself; but rather because the Flynn situation is a likely example of President Obama’s surveillance network in operation.Read much more here.
Obama’s surveillance network looks like this:
• White House identifies a target; •passes request to the DOJ National Security Division (middlemen); •who then use the auspices of possible FARA violations to pass the instructions to the FBI contractors; •who data-mine the NSA database.
•The FBI results are then passed back to the DOJ-NSD; •who weaponize the information for FISA applications (becomes legal cover); and •pass the authorized surveillance (spying) results back to the White House etc.
It’s a circle of surveillance activity that could encompass almost every politician in Washington DC as they network with foreign lobbyists and special interests.
"Unlaundered" Good! Check for DNA!
The Daily Mail has a piece about Trump's latest sexual abuse accuser, E. Jean Carroll.
Good! Check it for DNA!
The Daily Mail also has a list of fifteen other accusers, which I did not know about before reading the Daily Mail article.
Walk and talk: Carroll has been leading Hideous Men tours around the city, where she stops at Trump Tower (above outside the building with one group)
Read more here.
The Donna Karan coat dress still hangs on the back of my closet door, unworn and unlaundered since that evening,' reveals Carroll.
Good! Check it for DNA!
The Daily Mail also has a list of fifteen other accusers, which I did not know about before reading the Daily Mail article.
She now joins a list of accusers that includes: Jessica Leeds, Kristin Anderson, Jill Harth, Cathy Heller, Temple Taggart McDowell, Karena Virginia, Melinda McGillivray, Rachel Crooks, Natasha Stoynoff, Jessica Drake, Ninni Laaksonen, Summer Zervos, Juliet Huddy, Alva Johnson, and Cassandra Searles.
Walk and talk: Carroll has been leading Hideous Men tours around the city, where she stops at Trump Tower (above outside the building with one group)
Read more here.
Leverage
Trump is scheduled to meet with Xi this Saturday. Sundance writes in the Conservative Treehouse,
...Can you see what President Trump is doing here?Read more here.
Trump is mirroring the historic approach deployed by China. Beijing is facing a new dynamic where the U.S. President will not accept any retreat from his current position. This zero-sum outlook is exactly the same approach all Chinese negotiators use…. only this time it’s Trump using their strategy against them. It’s President Trump who will not retreat from gained position. This has to be seriously perplexing for Beijing.
Now, to be fair, unlike China President Trump is not constitutionally predisposed to never give ground… he’s a negotiator of reasonable compromise. However, President Trump has modified his approach based on his knowledge of his adversary.
In essence, Donald Trump is mirroring the ideology and negotiating position of the person on the other side of the table….. only now, based on two-years of groundwork in preparation for his position, President Trump is carrying all the strength and leverage.
China is on its heels. Trump has set up a dynamic where a pre-planned group of regional allies can easily compensate for any manufacturing deficit caused by Trump’s adversarial position toward China. The corporate exodus visible within this plan has already begun.
The G20 is being held in Osaka, Japan. Essentially President Trump’s home turf as expressed by his relationship with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the recent high-honor of the first state visit to celebrate new Japanese Emperor Naruhito.
The geography for the G20 is perfect for this moment. The dynamic of regional allies are all aligned with Trump as planned from the November 2017 ‘golden ticket‘ tour of Asia. Additionally, President Trump carries all of the economic leverage he was quietly assembling as Beijing underestimated and misinterpreted the Trump bravado.
At no time in history has a U.S. President ever had all of the consequential dynamics aligned in his favor. This did not happen accidentally.
That’s why U.S. officials are saying they are not coming to the meeting with any concessions, and for the first time in modern history Beijing will have to make the compromise, or suffer a very visible set of consequences.
Anderson Cooper never wanted to go to a break more than he did after this! He couldn't get the words out of his mouth fast enough!
Anderson Cooper went straight to commercial right after this comment. pic.twitter.com/hkM7KCYw71
— Cameron Cawthorne (@Cam_Cawthorne) June 25, 2019
"Even he deserves always to have every right to express his foolish ideas detached from reality."
In American Greatness, Ned Ryun writes,
David French and his fellow peacetime conservatives are at it again, wringing their hands and gnashing their teeth as U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) takes a run at curtailing the immense power of Big Tech.Read more here.
As French channels Neville Chamberlain, the fact is that unless the tech companies are forcefully confronted, now, in the immediate, our self-governing republic will be over in less than a generation and we will be ruled by a tech oligarchy.
...First, we would do well to remember that roughly 20 years ago, Washington, D.C. created this problem by carving out the Section 230 exemption for neutral platforms online. Only a fool would think that the tech companies are neutral platforms today. They have, by their own distinct decisions, become publishers and telecommunications companies: if you are making publishing decisions, if you are deploying broadband, if you are creating and streaming live content, you are a publisher or a telecommunications company, and sometimes both.
If we do not correct our mistakes, our great rights of speech and assembly, offline and online, are in danger. Someone is going to be the final defender of our natural rights as codified in the Constitution. Do we want un-elected global monopolistic corporations—entities that may or may not consider themselves American companies, ruling you by algorithms? Do we want them limiting the flow of information in the online public arena, manipulating it to benefit themselves and their view of the world? Or do we want duly elected leaders of a constitutional republic defending our rights?
In a constitutional republic, all power flows from the people to their various elected officials, not to corporations or private companies. And when monopolies develop, in order to reset to a free-market dynamic, monopolies must be broken up so that competition can benefit the consumer once more.
...I want a constitutional republic with my natural rights guaranteed, not only for myself and my children but even for dangerously naïve people like French. Even he deserves always to have every right to express his foolish ideas detached from reality.
Platform, or Publisher?
Ace addresses the issue of big tech being a platform vs. publisher.
...note that these platforms are quick to ban groups like the Proud Boys even though the Proud Boys aren't hate groups routinely engaged in violence, and yet rarely ban Antifa groups, which are hate groups that routinely use these platforms to target people for violence, and to coordinate violence.Read more here.
Why should Google and FaceBook and Twitter have the cover of section 230 when it's quite clear they are affirmatively bending their own rules to allow violent domestic terrorist groups to plot and scheme using their platform? They've demonstrated both the capability and desire to ban political groups for far less than what Antifa does; if they're permitting antifa to remain, why should they not be parties to a lawsuit that targets antifa for its violence? They have chosen to continue offering their services to known law-breakers, for purposes of law-breaking.
...If you have the time and personnel to ban Crowder, you have the time and personnel to ban Antifa. And if you choose not to -- then you are liable for their crimes.
...So a publisher has the right to not print people's speech if they don't like it, or find it objectionable, but they also have the responsibility of checking to see if all statements published by them are legal and true, and may face legal suit (or possibly even criminal prosecution) if they're not.
...This is just one of the incongruities that arises when a company is permitted to claim one status -- "We're speakers and you can't compel us to permit speech we disagree with!" -- for one set of circumstances but invoke an entirely contradictory status -- "We're not speakers at all!" -- for others.
It's time to resolve this.
These companies are in fact media companies -- the largest and most profitable in the world. Google makes NBC look like a corner shop.
And if they themselves are going to willingly, knowingly abandon their positions as "non-speakers" -- as bona fide neutral content platforms -- then they should join the rest of the media in being potential liable for defamation or conspiracies to commit violence that they permit their platforms to be used for.
Stephanie Grisham is the new White HousePress Secretary and Communications Director
The Blaze reports, Who is Stephanie Grisham?
Grisham has been with Melania Trump since the campaign. She had been considered one of the most likely candidates to replace Sanders.
A source close to the Trump administration told the Daily Wire "Grisham is pure Trump," adding "she holds down the East Wing with ease and has no loyalties to any faction within the Republican Party. Members of the first family love her and know that she is fiercely dedicated and loyal." She was also described by that source as a "favorite of Trump loyalists."
According to the Washington Post, Grisham was also a driving force between Trump's decision to fire former-deputy national security adviser Mira Ricardel.
Prior to joining Trump's team, Grisham had worked for Sen. Mitt Romney's (R-Utah) presidential campaign in 2012.
What happened now?
On Tuesday, Melania Trump tweeted "I am pleased to announce @StephGrisham45 will be the next @PressSec & Comms Director! She has been with us since 2015 - @potus & I can think of no better person to serve the Administration & our country. Excited to have Stephanie working for both sides of the @WhiteHouse. #BeBest"
In response, Sanders tweeted that she thought Grisham would be "an incredible asset to the President and the country."
Monday, June 24, 2019
Another demonetized video
Scott begins by telling us that his July 22 video was "instantly demonetized" by YouTube. Here it is: https://bobagard.blogspot.com/2019/06/scott-adams-views-on-top-news-stories.html
Scott believes he gets demonetized because of topics he covers (the main stories in the news)!
An AI could actually commit a crime and know that it is committing a crime. Should we have a special court to try crimes committed by AI machines?
The NBA has decided the owners of NBA teams can no longer be called "owners." They want to call them "Governors."
Bernie Sanders wants to make college and tech schools "debt free" for students. He would do that by taxing Wall Street transactions. Scott would like to see what economists say about this tax on Wall Street transactions. Scott thinks it might be a good plan. It is worth a look.
San Diego is building tent cities for the homeless. Scott puts forth the idea of having one place for all homeless people. All the cities in California could ship their homeless to one city!
New Iran sanctions were put into place today. A top Saudi diplomat said the history of bad relations with Israel is over for the Arab world. Arab world! More isolation for Iran.
Jared Kushner is putting forth a new Middle East peace plan. Why is there not much talk about it? The Palestinian leadership has turned down lots of money that was to be part of the deal. $50 billion dollars?
Iran has threatened that they could shoot down more of our drones.
Ravelry doesn't want to support white supremacy. Scott thinks they should stick to their knitting.
Jordan Peterson has a new social media site called Thinkspot that is coming in the future.
JFK and Trump. Weird similarities.
Pete Buttigieg not looking like a leader. Going nowhere.
Kamala Harris has one big problem. She has an unconfident smile and laugh. Trump doesn't laugh at his own jokes. He has a very controlled reaction to the humor. Kamal Harris has a nervous smile and laugh which projects a lack of confidence. It is like she is laughing at her boss's joke. Subordinate! Submissive! Scott believes she can fix it and thereby rise in the polls.
Scott believes he gets demonetized because of topics he covers (the main stories in the news)!
An AI could actually commit a crime and know that it is committing a crime. Should we have a special court to try crimes committed by AI machines?
The NBA has decided the owners of NBA teams can no longer be called "owners." They want to call them "Governors."
Bernie Sanders wants to make college and tech schools "debt free" for students. He would do that by taxing Wall Street transactions. Scott would like to see what economists say about this tax on Wall Street transactions. Scott thinks it might be a good plan. It is worth a look.
San Diego is building tent cities for the homeless. Scott puts forth the idea of having one place for all homeless people. All the cities in California could ship their homeless to one city!
New Iran sanctions were put into place today. A top Saudi diplomat said the history of bad relations with Israel is over for the Arab world. Arab world! More isolation for Iran.
Jared Kushner is putting forth a new Middle East peace plan. Why is there not much talk about it? The Palestinian leadership has turned down lots of money that was to be part of the deal. $50 billion dollars?
Iran has threatened that they could shoot down more of our drones.
Ravelry doesn't want to support white supremacy. Scott thinks they should stick to their knitting.
Jordan Peterson has a new social media site called Thinkspot that is coming in the future.
JFK and Trump. Weird similarities.
Pete Buttigieg not looking like a leader. Going nowhere.
Kamala Harris has one big problem. She has an unconfident smile and laugh. Trump doesn't laugh at his own jokes. He has a very controlled reaction to the humor. Kamal Harris has a nervous smile and laugh which projects a lack of confidence. It is like she is laughing at her boss's joke. Subordinate! Submissive! Scott believes she can fix it and thereby rise in the polls.
Political segregation
David Greenfield writes in Sultan Knish,
...Facebook has 2.3 billion active users, Google processes 3.5 billion searches per day, Twitter has 321 million monthly users, and 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every day. Segregation at this level can shut entire populations out of political participation in the marketplace of ideas. AI can then invisibly automate discriminatory policies and structurally embed them into countless sites across the internet.Read more here.
...A powerful elite has decided that a certain class of people should be shut out from being able to fully make use of public services. These policies of political segregation have not been openly articulated, but they have been exposed by hidden camera investigations, by lawsuits from employees fired for their political views, and by the pattern emerging from the mass of bans, shadowbans and demonetizations.
The latest crackdown by Google’s YouTube is typical of the use of non-transparent policies that are selectively applied and whose rationale represents structural discrimination against conservatives.
The new segregation masquerades as desegregation. Its implementation is segregating millions.
...As many as 70% of Democrats have negative stereotypes of Republicans. It's the only socially acceptable prejudice. And what we are seeing in Silicon Valley is the implementation of those prejudices in policy.
This is the civil rights crisis of our time. The segregation is growing. And it must be met with a new movement to fight political discrimination in businesses, and especially among the dot coms.
America no longer has a racial segregation problem. It has a political segregation problem.
Some of the biggest companies in the country, which wield nearly total control over the internet, are politically segregated, have developed a culture of discrimination toward conservatives, and have engaged in a pattern of discriminatory conduct based on those prejudiced views.
...It is an “elementary right”, as President John F. Kennedy put it, for conservatives to enjoy the same use of services at Facebook, Google, Twitter and Amazon, as anyone else. And the same access to financial services, such as MasterCard and Visa, which at one point banished the Freedom Center over its politics, the same right to visit a restaurant or a bar, or to teach in a school, regardless of their political affiliation.
This elementary right must be safeguarded by protecting not just sexual identity, but political identity.
The Bill of Rights is not built around most of the protected classes listed by many states, but around religious and political freedom. These were the issues that the revolt against British rule was built on. These are the rights that were meant to be safeguarded above all others. That guardianship has failed.
Conservatives are being silenced on the internet, fired from their jobs and evicted from their homes.
Republicans have enjoyed repeated majorities, have held the White House, and yet failed to take meaningful nationwide action to stop these abuses. Protecting political affiliation is a first step.
It is time for another Civil Rights Act to end political segregation by some of the most powerful corporations in America.
"We face," as Kennedy put it, "a moral crisis as a country and a people.”
Political segregation is the crisis of our time. It is time to meet it, not merely with rhetoric or excuses, but with solutions.
An absolutely vital video which probably will not be available for long!
Another whistleblower has bravely come forward at Google to talk with Project Veritas.
"Fairness means manipulating Google's search results so they rebias their algorithm so they can get their agenda across."
"ML Fairness (ML stands for Machine Learning) is about the social justice narrative."
"Google is still masquerading as a platform, even though they are acting as a publisher."
"Google is targeting YouTube personalities whom they believe are right wing (He mentions Tim Poole, Steven Crowder, and Dave Rubin "and a host of other right-wing people"). They are deciding what content users are allowed to see."
Google is deciding what's important and what is not important. Google decides what gets read, consumed, what people are able to click on. People still think Google is an objective source of information, and it is not.
"...a movement built on high-octane emotion and blind belief."
In City Journal, Harry Stein writes about the decade of the 1930s and its similarity to today's Left.
...While CPUSA membership likely never exceeded more than 75,000—and even for many of them, the particulars of the Communist political program surely registered as mumbo jumbo—fellow travelers numbered in the millions, and Communist-backed special causes, each near-biblical in its moral sweep, brought multitudes to the streets. Sacco and Vanzetti. The Scottsboro Boys. Republican Spain. And the pageantry and the music—Woody Guthrie ballads and labor anthems like “Which Side Are You On?” and Paul Robeson’s Godlike basso profundo on the Victrola in every left-wing home, with his heartrending dirge to the murdered union man Joe Hill. It was a movement built on high-octane emotion and blind belief.Sounds like what we are experiencing today with big tech censorship of conservatives!
A gifted reporter, Eugene Lyons had seen the Communist revolution firsthand in Stalin’s Soviet Union—and what he saw changed his life and perspective. (BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES)
...But in this saga of equal parts moral blindness and impenetrable self-righteousness, it is Lyons’s extended treatment of Hollywood that will likely strike contemporary readers as most familiar. For while the film community had more than its share of those steeped in Communist Party doctrine, the Party’s great achievement was in making leftism fashionable. “I saw Social Consciousness quicken and come to a boil in actors, writers and directors whose names rival Rinso and Camels as household words,” he writes of witnessing the spectacle at close hand. “The political pig-Latin of class struggle, anti-fascism, and revolutionary tactics rippled around swimming pools and across dance floors. . . . They had not the remotest idea what communism was in terms of economic structures or political superstates. For nearly all of them it was an intoxicated state of mind, a glow of inner virtue, and a sort of comradeship of super-charity.”
Adhering to the right beliefs and supporting the right causes was not just how to fit in, but how to get ahead. For those on the rise, or hoping to be, it “became the shortcut to success. At ‘cause parties’ they rubbed shoulders and bosoms with big shots they could not have met otherwise. Those who tried to detour the revolution, unless they were stars well fixed in the firmament, found themselves slipping from favor. It was at once a movement and a lobby, a religion and a racket.”
Given his intimate acquaintance with the Left, Lyons well knew what calumnies the publication of The Red Decade would bring down on his head. At the time, especially in elite circles, the charge of “red baiting” was akin to that of racism, sexism, or homophobia today; whether made in anger or with premeditated intent, it was enough to halt any challenge to the Left’s worldview. It was a weapon deployed, he wrote, by “literary critics, book reviewers and political commentators . . . a neatly contrived device for heading off free and uninhibited discussion of little things such as man-made famines, horrifying blood purges, forced labor on a gigantic scale.” In fact, in almost every meaningful arena of American life, those who “ran afoul of the revolution were made to feel the full weight of their crimes; they were ostracized socially, handicapped professionally and not infrequently stripped of their jobs as well as their reputations for ordinary decency.”
Lyons’s own world of book and magazine publishing was so dominated by leftists that former adherents who turned against the Party, deemed “moral monsters and turncoats,” could be made essentially to evaporate from mainstream view. He lists no fewer than 30 writers who suffered that fate during “the intellectual red terror,” including (as if to underscore the point for contemporary readers) such now largely forgotten former luminaries as Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, and James T. Farrell. He includes himself on that list. “The part I cannot induce the uninitiated to believe is how effective the terror could be,” he writes. “When you first met a particularly far-fetched libel on your character, it merely seemed funny in its absurdity.” But continually repeated, he adds, the lies take their toll, for wherever one tried to make one’s way professionally, “there were manuscript readers, casting directors, book reviewers who—consciously or by a sort of pack instinct—took their prejudices ready-made from the Popular Front comrades.”Read more here.
...today, with the Left driven by a different, if no less bizarre, notion of the ideal equitable society—one where individual merit is trumped by race, gender, and sexual orientation—CEOs of multinational firms cower, lest they be found insufficiently committed to diversity or otherwise fail to heed the harsh dictates of identity politics. Mozilla chief Brendan Eich gets fired for contributing to an anti-gay-marriage initiative; Google dispatches James Damore for a memo questioning the company’s ideological mono-culture; Papa John’s namesake founder is dumped after quoting someone else’s use of the N-word as a negative example in a public-relations session. We may not hear the word “Stalinist” much anymore, but this is stuff right out of the intellectual red terror.
...At least rhetorically, the Communists of the late 1930s were, in fact, far less hostile to the American idea than are today’s run-of-the-mill progressives. In an age where Americans were raised to revere their country’s singular history, they all but wrapped themselves in the flag. “Communism Is Twentieth-Century Americanism” went the party’s famous Popular Front slogan, and they did not hesitate to name their Spanish battalions for Lincoln and Washington or the Party school for Marxist instruction after Jefferson. The contrast with today’s Left, which sees American history as a cavalcade of oppression, could not be more striking. Little wonder that today’s Democrats, seeking to stay abreast of their fervent base, are as publicly invested in identity politics and collectivist economics as the denizens of any faculty lounge.
Long before, Lyons wrote in The Red Decade: “I have known men and women so frightened by the certainty of persecution from the Left, that they hid their doubts and disillusionments like criminal secrets.”
That was not his way. He knew what he’d signed up for, and never stopped taking the attacks for what they were: confirmation that he was doing something right.
Are you living in a conservative dreamworld?
Daniel Horowitz writes in Conservative Review,
What’s the bottom line for originalists? We only have one solid originalist on the court. Gorsuch is a very reliable ally of Thomas in most cases, but he often won’t go as far in rolling back existing bad precedent, depending on the issue. Alito has become unreliable on many issues, even as he remains quite solid on others. In this case, he indicated that while he normally doesn’t like overturning such convictions, he felt this case was “likely one of a kind.” And Kavanaugh is the new Roberts.Read much more here.
The Left has successfully enmeshed its entire agenda into racially sensitive jurisprudence, wrapping its abortion, election law, immigration, sexuality, and criminal law agenda in an identity politics juggernaut that only Thomas seems to be willing to confront head-on. If you think for a moment that there exists anywhere near a majority to stop the expansion of bad precedents – especially when they intersect with race-baiting politics – you are living in a conservative dream world.
What should we look for in Trump's tweets of this week's Democrat debates?
In The Federalist, Margot Cleveland wrote about five things we might expect from Donald Trump tweeting the two debates the Democrats are having this week.
1. Coining New NicknamesRead more here.
Trump’s penchant for nicknames is so prolific that there is an entire Wikipedia page summarizing the various monikers he has bestowed on politicians and media personalities. Trump has already christened several of the Democrats vying for the presidential nomination with names meant to both irritate the individual and educate the public, as well as send the media down a rabbit hole of epic proportions.
2. Saying the Shocking Equally predictable? That Trump will tweet something shocking, whether it be un-P.C., outright rude, or just bluntly speaking a truth the mainstream media refuses to report or covers only tentatively.
3. Feeding the In-Fighting
Trump’s tweets will also likely pit two or three of the candidates (and their supporters) against one another. We saw this approach when Sanders took on the Democratic National Committee-anointed Hillary Clinton. Expect Trump to remind the socialist-leaning base of the Democratic Party that Sanders was robbed, while suggesting Biden waits in the wings to steal the nomination from the now-rightful heir. A simple “DNC robbed Bernie in 16 and now Biden’s ready to steal the nomination again,” tweet, better phrased by the master, will serve the purpose simply enough.
4. Throwing Shade at Recalcitrant Republicans
Democrats won’t be the only ones likely targeted in any tweet storm: Look for Trump to also hit recalcitrant Republicans. John Kasich serves this dual purpose well. Think: “Alfred E. Newman has the appeal of Kasich. NOne.” Or “Kasich’s dad was a postman. Biden rides Am Trak. WHO CARES?”
5. Celebrating His Accomplishments
The two nights of presidential Twitter won’t likely focus solely on snark and shade. Substance and success, or “winning bigly,” will likely share equal billing for the president. Whether it be the economy, jobs, judicial appointments, or deregulation, the president has plenty of accomplishments to tout, but the media continues to downplay or ignore them.
Just by suggesting he’ll have his smartphone at the ready, Trump has put himself in the head of every Democratic contender. Watch for Trump to jump the legacy media and take his message to the people under the guise of debate commentary. With every new, ridiculous proposal floated by the vying candidates, Trump can counter with the specifics on his successes.
The candidates must now focus, not just on what one of their primary opponents might say, and to which they will have an opportunity to respond in real time, but also on what the president is tweeting out, unanswered, to millions. Their campaigns are likely now crafting clever one-liners to preempt Trump’s tweets, but as the Republican primaries proved, you can’t beat Trump at his own game, so you’re better off not trying.
Who is going to be impeaching whom?
Dov Fischer writes in the American Spectator,
...So we elect Trump, who promises to deport 10 million Illegals, and we give him a Republican House and a Republican Senate, and we oust John Boehner for a new young dynamic GOP House Speaker who was the Vice Presidential nominee and conservative conscience of the losing Romney campaign, and that guy turns out to be Whatever. He gets his one “Budget Reconciliation” chance in a two-year legislative term to pass a budget that will build a border wall because that is the one bill every two years that does not require a filibuster-proof 60-vote Senate vote for passage, so it’s a piece of cake. And he “pulls a Bill Buckner” (rest his soul) and leaves it out. So even though the President proves to be a once-in-a-generation Transformational President who brashly eliminates swaths of economy-strangling regulations, who dramatically renegotiates one after another terrible international trade treaty, who fearlessly pulls out of cockamamie international fiascoes like the Iran Deal and the Paris Climate Nonsense, who moves the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and recognizes United Jerusalem as Israel’s eternal capital and Israeli sovereignty over the Golan, who directs laser-focused attention at the border crisis and tries one-after-another-after-another stratagem to deal with the morass, who waves a magic wand and resurrects a Dead Economy with bold tax cuts and even more determined deregulating and converts it into a blazing-hot engine, who reduces African-American, Hispanic-American, Asian-American, and female unemployment to historic lows, who changes the face of the Supreme Court and nominates more than one hundred solid conservative federal district and appellate judges, who reimagines America’s energy-producing capabilities and converts America into a net exporter of energy and the world’s largest energy producer, who recalibrates the Veterans Administration and V.A. health care, who forces through a “Right to Try” initiative that allows Americans with perilous ailments access to cutting-edge medical research possibilities — despite all that, and so much more, the GOP House not only drops the ball but butt-fumbles.There is much more here.
"Reparations now, reparations tomorrow, and reparations forever."
Oregon Muse writes in the Ace of Spades blog,
"You know, I'm about ready to do a deal on reparations. Wait, don't go, this is not going to be 'The Conservative Case For Caving In On Reparations', no, you'll have to go to the Cuckshed Bulwark Online for that, but here it is: we give reparations, we will make one TRILLION dollars available to any American citizen of African American descent (and we'll use the old 'one drop rule' for mixed-race determination) and in return, everyone will have to finally SHUT UP, once and for all, about racism. That's it. Finished. It's done. You don't get to talk about it, whine about it, bitch about it anymore. Disband Black Lives Matter. Dissolve the NAACP, abolish the Congressional Black Caucus, and revoke Farrakhan's cult church's tax-exempt status. No more bitching and moaning, you've been paid off and you now have to get on with your lives. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton will now have to get real jobs. African Americans can pool all of that sweet, sweet reparations cash and use it to rebuild Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other inner cities without any interference from evil racist white guys.
We could all live together in peace and love and harmony. Thank God Almighty, we'll be free at last. For a measly trillion dollars, it would almost be worth it. But the reason this is not a serious proposal is that I realize that even with this payout, it's not going to end there. Here's a book that argues for giving reparations for women for all of the uncompensated work that they've done over the years. And perhaps you've heard that Elizabeth Warren wants to give reparations to homosexuals for supposed injustices in the U.S. tax code due to 'unequal marriage laws'. As soon as we pay off one reparation claim, every last aggrieved minority will be lining up for their slice of the reparations pie. In fact, they'll probably even invent some new aggrieved groups just for the purpose of cashing in. And holy smokes, this is where intersectionality is really going to pay off big time. Because it's going to be reparations now, reparations tomorrow, and reparations forever."
"Sentenced to an additional 20 years for disparaging Comatose-Americans"
More satire from IMAO:
Zuckerberg Buys Alcatraz Island to House Violators of New Facebook Hate
You can bet these guys will never compliment Chick-Fil-A in public again.
MENLO PARK (AP) – As part of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to have the most aggressive anti-hate speech policy on social media, the billionaire entrepreneur purchased the entire island of Alcatraz, including its prison facilities, with the intention of housing policy violators there.
Zuckerberg explained his decision to finally put some much needed “teeth” into a policy that is often just words and air on other platforms.
“Facebook opposes hate speech,” said Zuckerberg. “Also hate agents, hate statements, hate signals, hate ideologies, hate entities, hate symbols, hate slogans, hate paraphernalia, and neutral statements about the aforementioned hate items. However, until now, all we’ve been able to do is deplatform violators. But then they just go to Gab and go right on hate-speeching, because the stupid government won’t let us control everyone’s speech even though it’d be best for everyone.”
“Then I thought, well, they sure couldn’t do what they wanted if they were in prison. Epiphany! I’ll just buy a prison and put all the people I don’t like in it.”
But where to find a prison? Zuckerberg considered several possibilities. The first of which, a penal colony on Devil’s Island, had recently been taken off the market after being purchased by a former prisoner who’d turned it into a butterfly sanctuary.
Second choice was Gitmo, but after brief consideration, Zuckerberg decided against it.
“Gitmo is already full of falsely accused victims of racism,” Zuckerberg said, “and I didn’t want to traumatize them by putting a bunch of alt-righties in their midst. I couldn’t risk them getting hate-speeched. Which is just like waterboarding, except with words instead of water. They’d probably call it ‘wordboarding.'”
“Finally, though, I decided on Alcatraz,” said Zuckerberg. “San Fran didn’t want to sell because it’s the only place in the Bay area that’s not hip deep in homeless people, but I just shoveled more cash into the back of the ol’ money truck. That did the trick. Man! California politicians just loooove their money!”
Alcatraz’s first inmate of the Facebook era – an unrepentant thug known on the street as “Tiny Tim” – protested the injustice of his 20-year sentence.
“All I said was I hate eggplants. I’m five years old! I hate ALL vegetables!”
As of this writing, Tim had been sentenced to an additional 20 years for disparaging Comatose-Americans.
He figured it out, but then they let him go!
From the Babylon Bee:
Google Employee Discovers Someone Accidentally Switched The Computers To 'Evil'
June 24th, 2019
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA —After a slew of controversies surrounding Google's desire to censor videos on YouTube and impact election results, IT director Floyd Parker was tasked with figuring out what had gone wrong at the multi-jillion dollar company.
"Oop! There it is!" Parker exclaimed as he opened the Windows settings on one of the employee's computers. "You've got your computer's morality setting turned all the way over to completely evil." Parker showed the employee how to move the slider the other direction, closer to good.
But Parker soon discovered that all of the computers at Google had been set to fully evil. "Hoo boy! I've really got my work cut out for me today," he said.
However, as soon as Parker began changing the morality settings on Google's machines, they began overheating and soon the tech giant's massive facility lost power. "That's weird. Apparently, the system here was never designed to handle high levels of goodness," Parker said while scratching his head. "Looks like I've got plenty to do today."
Parker was let go later that day. Google could not be reached for a statement.
Buttigieg wants to find a gun free zone sign that works!
In IMAO, Harvey reports (satirically, I think),
COLUMBIA, SC (AP) – At a town hall-style meeting in South Carolina, Pete Buttigieg promised to address the problem of mass shootings from a different angle by tasking the Department of Defense with creating “gun free zone” signs that are more effective at keeping guns out of the areas where they’re posted.Read more here.
Struggling to maintain 4th place in the polls behind Biden, Sanders, and Warren, Buttigieg said he’s taking a “fresh approach to the problem,” one which he thinks will differentiate him from the rest of the Democrat pack as primary season approaches.
"Some of the other candidates have already given up on gun free zone signs as the best way to prevent mass shootings, but these people are overlooking one important fact: at every mass shooting, gun free zone signs are 99% effective. They disarm every person in the building except the shooter himself. Now, if we can find a way to make these signs just 1% more effective, we can finally leave mass shootings in the dustbin of history once and for all.”
Unraveling
I agree with MOTUS AD, who writes that progressives are unraveling.
Somebody should remind the current crop of progressives that at one time “freedom of speech” was a core value of liberalism…and that it included freedom to speak things that they specifically don’t like, don’t want and don’t believe in. That’s what makes it “free,” free of your endorsement.Go here to read more and watch an appropriate video.
If they’re not careful they’ll come completely undone.
Yesterday I posted on Facebook a link to a story about the possibility of Sarah Sanders running for Governor of Arkansas. Facebook notified me that my post violated community standards and I would be the only one who could see the post!!!!
yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes
Seth Godin writes in his blog,
That’s exciting to hear.
Until you realize that if you switch just one letter around, it spells
eyes eyes eyes…
As soon as you’re applauded, you have eyes on you.
Eyes that belong to humans, to critics, to people hoping for the best. Mostly, to people who expect you to keep your promises.
That’s part of the deal of ‘yes.’
Sunday, June 23, 2019
Why aren't you caving like all your predecessors?
The G20 summit will be held in Japan beginning Thursday. A highlight will be meetings between America and China. China's leader is disappointed that President Trump has not caved to China's efforts to contain North Korea. President Trump is wanting to see real change on issues like China's theft of intellectual property from American companies. As usual, Sundance and his commenters at the Conservative Treehouse are making cogent points here.
I just saw a news report saying that Japan has been hit with a 5.5 magnitude earthquake! Stay home, Mr. President!
I just saw a news report saying that Japan has been hit with a 5.5 magnitude earthquake! Stay home, Mr. President!
"...pandering to a charlatan with a history of inciting violence and racism"
David Harsanyi writes in The Federalist,
...apparently Obama’s resuscitation of Sharpton (who, since 2011, has been at MSNBC, a cable news network that interminably lectures uncouth Americans on proper tone) has worked. Many of the very same Democratic Party hopefuls who boycotted the tepid bipartisanship of an AIPAC conference last month could be found speaking at Sharpton’s National Action Network Convention in New York this past week, pandering to a charlatan with a history of inciting violence and racism.
Harsanyi goes on to list lowlights of Sharpton's career, then notes,
Never once, as far as I can tell, have any of his didactic colleagues on cable news asked him about these career highlights. Not once did a reporter ask any of the presidential candidates about Sharpton’s history.Read more here.
As a native New Yorker, I hold a grudge. That doesn’t mean others can’t forgive Sharpton for the horrible things he’s done. It’s something else, however, when a remorseless man with a history of hucksterism and cruelty is not only being flattered as national moral leader by presidential candidates but that those same politicians are being given a free pass as they kowtow to a reprehensible character.
Twitter allows Leftist domestic terrorists to stay on its platform!
Antifa domestic terrorists have put up posters all around DC listing the home addresses of Tucker Carlson and Trump aide Stephen Miller. Twitter blocked the addresses, but is allowing the terrorists to stay on its platform! Ian Miles Cheng reports in Human Events,
The Fox News host wasn’t the only figure whose home address was written on the posters. All Out DC also doxed U.S. government official Stephen Miller.Read more here.
...The posters feature Carlson’s face blocked out by the AntiFa three-arrow symbol, his home address, the words “Block the Alt-Right,” and a description of Carlson as an “Influencer,” which reads:
Racist with a huge following and platform, uses it to promote racist dogwhistles.
...The loosely organized political movement is made up of anarchists and self-proclaimed communists who rally against President Donald Trump, a man whom they falsely accuse of promoting white supremacy.
Best known setting fires and rioting on campus grounds at U.C. Berkeley and vandalizing store fronts, proponents of the movement are self-described “social justice warriors” whom the Department of Homeland Security and other security agencies have designated their actions as “domestic terrorist violence.”
Three members of AntiFa were charged with aggravated assault, ethnic intimidation, and conspiracy, over the attacks of two U.S. Marine reservists. A mob of “10 to 12 people” attacked the two Mexican-American men in Philadelphia, whom they mistakenly identified as members of a right-wing group called the Proud Boys.
Run, Sarah, Run! (Plus some Facebook censorship)
In the Horn News, William Murray tells us why Sarah Huckabee Sanders may, in fact, be planning to run for Governor of Arkansas. Read his thoughts here.
When I posted on Facebook the link to the article in the Horn News, Facebook told me the post violated their Community Standards and only I could see the post! Big tech is ruining a great thing!
Destroying America's Democracy
In Strategic Culture, Robert Bridge writes about how Silicon Valley tech giants are destroying democracy by playing political favorites.
As the social media companies hide behind their ‘private’ corporate status in order to curb political speech on their platforms with total impunity, they are exerting, at the very same time, powerful influence on the political process. In other words, they are empowered to do the very thing that many of their platform users are not, and that is to support their political convictions without fear of reprisal, banning and censorship. They want to have their private cake and eat it too.Read more here.
The New York Times is doing its part in playing political favorites...The so-called “alt-right,” however, is not serving up extremist beliefs or Nazi ideology to attract viewers, as the New York Times claims, but rather coherent arguments that challenge the tenets of modern Liberal thinking. It may shock a lot of people, but a person does not have to be a Neo-Nazi to want strong national borders, for example, and laws that prohibit children from being taught about transgender lifestyles in grade school. Yet that is exactly how the right-leaning creators are being portrayed. And it is worth noting that these conservative ‘citizen journalists’ are doing a much better job at attracting audiences than the mainstream media, which is hemorrhaging both viewers and profits.
Needless to say, such hypocrisy and double standards on the part of the social media behemoths cannot continue in the so-called ‘land of the free.’ And with US presidential elections approaching in 2020, tensions over such arbitrary power by the social media companies will only intensify when the people come to understand their voices are being silenced. The situation may get bad enough that the question of social media freedoms will even be heard on the debate floor during the campaigns. At least we can dream; it seems to be all we have left these days.
Our first moon landing
Do you know anyone who doubts that the U.S. actually landed on the moon? Have them download BBC's podcasts of 13 Minutes to the Moon.
Another fantastic scientific discovery!
In the Daily Mail, Ian Randall reports,
Remarkable footage shows how a revolutionary technique is letting scientists peer into cells at the genetic level — both imaging the cell and sequencing its DNA.Read more here and see videos and photos.
Unlike traditional microscopes, which use light, the new approach uses DNA 'bar codes' to label each molecule in the cell.
From readings of the complex interactions of these labels with the molecules and each other, a computer algorithm can work backward to reveal an image of the cell.
DNA microscopy could find myriad applications — including helping scientists study immune cells and tumours to develop new treatments to fight cancer.
First Democratic debates begin this week
In the American Thinker, Clarice Feldman approves of President Trump's plan to live tweet the Democrats' presidential candidates debates. They will be this Wednesday and Thursday. It looks to me like the Thursday one will be the more interesting one.
U.S. launched a retaliatory cyber strike against Iranian computer systems
The New York Times reports,
AP reported at 7:30 pm yesterday,
United States Cyber Command on Thursday conducted online attacks against an Iranian intelligence group that American officials believe helped plan the attacks against oil tankers in recent weeks, according to people briefed on the operation.Read more here.
AP reported at 7:30 pm yesterday,
Officials say U.S. military cyber forces earlier this week launched a retaliatory cyber strike against Iranian computer systems amid escalating tensions between the two countries.Read more here.
Three U.S. officials tell The Associated Press that the operation on Thursday evening disabled Iranian computer systems that controlled Iran’s rocket and missile launchers.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Yahoo News first reported the cyber strike.
Two of the officials say President Donald Trump authorized the cyber strike even as he called off a conventional military response to Iran’s downing of a U.S. surveillance drone.
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