How the media coordinates the narrative

Keoni Galt at Hawaiian Libertarian posts this image of the big six who control our media:

There IS such a thing, at this date of the world's history, as an independent press. Thanks to teh distributed network capabilities of teh Interwebz, the truth can actually be found...but it is almost more difficult now to find it than when we only had a few channels of media to consume. Now we have more channels than can be possibly counted, so that the truth can be plainly stated and most will never believe it, as we are bewildered and numbed to the overwhelming overload if mis- and dis- information of our BigSix controlled mass media.

You know it and I know it.

There are a few of you who dare to write your honest opinions without the cloak of anonymity on blogs, forums and social media accounts, but most people devoted to exposing the truth under the real world identities are either doxxed, censored, threatened, stripped of their livelihoods, or ridiculed into obscurity.

...We are the expendable human resources and mindless consumers of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks; they pull the string and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of the managers of our sheeple farm who use the BigSix multi-media organs to tell us all what and how to think.

But just 'cause they're saying it, doesn't mean we have to listen.

Read more here.

Will the US defend Iran against Israel?

Roger L. Simon writes at PJ Media about the Iran deal:

The Iranians made no concessions, only our side did, and we (especially the State Department) have lied continually to the American people about the extent of our concessions, most of which are hidden from view in side letters. But even if that weren’t so — and it is — the basics are clear. We have given Iran a pathway to a plutonium bomb while entirely gutting any possible inspections regime. We did this by abandoning the promised anytime/anywhere inspections for some bureaucratic mishmash that will take anywhere from 24 days to a year (depending on whom you ask) and by collapsing on the so-called PMDs (possible military dimensions) of Iran’s previous nuclear program, so there is no way to prove what is new and what is not in the first place. And to top it off, we have given the Iranians a signing bonus of 150 billion that, no doubt, will be used to finance either the Tehran branch of the Little Sisters of the Poor or another skillion mid-range missiles for Hezbollah. You decide.

Oh, and by the way, if we or someone else suspects the Iranians of cheating, the deal decrees that it is only the Iranians themselves who send us the putative evidence of their misdeeds. We don’t get to go there personally.

...But it gets worse. And excuse me for going off into the fever swamps of potential paranoia here, but what follows is the reason I wrote this article. I buried my lede deliberately because I have no evidence for it and because it’s so stupefyingly horrific that I can’t believe it, don’t want to believe it — and yet it rings true. I received email from a blogger I respect with information he received that alleges one of the secret letters is far more disturbing than anything disclosed so far. This document pledges to Iran that should Israel attack her nuclear facilities, the UN and the U.S. will defend Iran against Israel.

Do I believe this? All I can say is I wish I didn’t. If it’s true, my world will have changed yet again. Given everything that has happened, the way this deal has been set, it’s hard to disbelieve it.

How well is America doing?

It's time again for some charts and graphs. Elle's Economy gives us three important ones, with explanations for each.

The most basic metric for how well the country is doing is median household income – are families making more today than in years past? Errrr, not so fast there Mr. President. As the chart below shows (the red line) we are still well below we were when you took office… and that is despite the massive amount of government spending and monetary policy stimulus! Or perhaps, this is in fact because of all that insanity? In fact, median household income, after taking inflation into account, is where it was back in 1989, twenty-six years ago!


One of the reason household income is so low is that despite the often touted “unemployment rate” the more important number, the percentage of people in the country actually working is down to levels not seen since the early 80s and well below the ratio during George W Bush’s Presidency.


On top of that, 2.2 million Americans are in part-time jobs who want to work full time, still far above the level at the start of the recession and during George W’s entire Presidency.

2015-07 Part-time for economic reasons


So people are making less and fewer people are working… what about the debt burden on those who do have jobs? When Obama took office, the total Federal Debt was 10.7 trillion. Today it is over 18 trillion and expected to be well over 19 trillion by the time he leaves office. That’s more than an 80% increase in the debt burden shouldered by the American people in just 8 years, nearly doubling!

Read more here.

Will this be the lie that brings down Hillary?

Dick Morris explains the absurdity of Hillary's claims that she wanted her emails to be made public. The Morris video also explains why she may not be able to avoid prosecution. Watch the video here.

Politicians accumulating money, power, and prestige

Glenn Reynolds writes in USA Today,

politicians don’t care, except to the extent that we make them care. Whatever they say when they’re running for office, their top priority once elected is to build a coalition that will keep them in power, and accumulating money and influence, regardless of whether the interests of that coalition coincide with the public’s.

One of the reasons that America enjoyed such tremendous growth over the past century was that technology outran regulators’ ability to keep up. Will that remain true over the coming decades? Let’s hope so. We can’t make it in the 21st century with a 1950s economic model, however appealing that approach might be to politicians.

Read more here.

Children walking to school unsupervised

When you were a child, did you walk to school? I did, from kindergarten through 9th grade. How about now? Are you letting your child walk to school? Are you afraid someone will report you to Child Protective Services? Or, are you a helicopter parent, hovering over your child?

Elizabeth Price Foley writes at Instapundit,

In a zeal to “protect” the children, some adults are becoming super-nannies, swooping down to call protective services anytime they spy your child alone in a playground, saying the wrong words, with dirty clothes, living without modern amenities, or getting the “wrong” medical care. They think they know how to raise your kids better than you, so your children become “the State’s children” until you can wrestle them back. We are punishing parents, too often, for being poor or bucking cultural norms rather than being physically or emotionally abusive. The constitutional “right” to raise our children is being eroded–a goal political leftists have long sought.

Read more here.

Take that!

Have you been to a bus station lately? Anything can happen there. For example, there is this guy who became angry at having to pay an additional 2 dollars, and decided to head butt the bus door.

Read about it here.

The system isn't working

Ray Henry, Jay Reeves, and Rebecca Santana write for AP about the recent movie theater shooter in Louisiana. In his case, as in the case of James Homes in Aurora, Colorado, and Dylan Storm Roof in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the nation's gun sale monitoring system does not appear to be working any better than any other bureaucratic system.

Money-grubbing Planned Parenthood baby-parts harvesters, versus life saving angels

In this piece, Michelle Malkin compares the Planned Parenthood "doctors" with those who work every day to save babies' lives.


This Sept. 11, 2009 photo provided by Tundi and Nate Brady shows their 3-day-old son, Dexter, who was born about 16 weeks early, attached to a ventilator and feeding tubes under warming lights in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU)

The pretend objective media

Leon Wolf writes at Red State,

People say the press is mostly liberal. That’s by and large true, but it misses quite a lot of nuance in terms of where the press comes down on certain issues. There are people peppered throughout the national press corps with conservative or at least libertarian leanings on a whole host of issues. However, one issue on which the national press – even the ostensibly conservative members – is almost totally monolithic is life issues. Even Charles Krauthammer, while opposed to Roe v. Wade, supports legalized abortion. Ditto John Stossel, and virtually every other prominent token conservative/liberal member of the legacy media.

As a consequence, there is no issue with respect to which the media is more out of step with the American public, which is more or less split down the middle on the issue of abortion generally – and which has been watching with horror (when the media deigns to show them) these videos of doctors discussing the sale of babies’ livers with all the nonchalance of Tony Soprano discussing the price of hookers in New Jersey.

Read more here.

The communicator

Former Congressman Anthony Weiner, husband of Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, has a new job. Weiner, also known as Carlos Danger, the man who sends women pictures of his penis on the internet, has been hired by a Hillary Clinton donor to fix public relations messes. Seriously!

Carl Campanile writes at the New York Post,

The man who destroyed his own promising political career by botching a 2011 sext-message imbroglio with bald-faced lies — and who then ruined his comeback by running one of the most disastrous mayoral campaigns of all time — will now get paid to dispense advice to high-paying clients of the MWW p.r. firm, sources told The Post.

MWW is headed by Michael Kempner, a prominent New Jersey Democrat who has been a top fund-raiser for both Clinton and President Obama.

Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, is a top ­political adviser and longtime confidante of Clinton, the leading Democratic presidential candidate and former secretary of state.

Kempner is listed as one of Clinton’s “Hillblazers’’ — having raised more than $100,000 for her campaign since April.

Kempner also was one of the top bundler’s for Clinton’s 2008 bid for the White House, and has hosted Obama at his Cresskill, NJ, home.

The company said it was “pleased to welcome” Weiner to its “board of advisers” and he will dispense wisdom about “the workings of Congress and the City of New York.”

“He is a brilliant strategist [with] expertise on many issues,” the company said.

“[He] will be a great asset to our firm.”

Weiner — who used the moniker Carlos Danger in some of the infamous sexts that led to his fall from grace — does have experience with media crises, just not in handling them well.

He became a nationwide laughingstock in 2011 when he was forced to step down from Congress after lying about sending out an embarrassing image of his penis.

Weiner sent the photo of his manhood in boxer briefs to a 21-year-old female college student in Seattle. After he was caught, he stonewalled for a while, but when additional photos surfaced, he resigned. He then ran for mayor in 2013, claiming he had cleaned up his act.

But his mayoral campaign imploded after he got caught in a second sexting scandal.

He sent pictures of his private parts to then-22-year-old Sydney Leathers, using the Danger name. His campaign staffers were blindsided by the sordid revelations, which destroyed what some saw as a ­decent chance for redemption.

MWW issued a clarifying statement Thursday morning insisting that Weiner will work on policy, not crisis communications with clients.

Read more here.

Patience

Ann Voskamp writes at A Holy Experience,

So… it didn’t work out.

You know — That Thing.

In the dark, in the middle of the night, it gets very clear:
He who is hurried by worry, delays the comfort of God.

Pain begs us to believe that only action can end our ache — when actually only God can.

Action doesn’t end pain — God does.

And the making of one’s whole life takes time. Goals take longer than you think; the ways of God take longer than you want. It takes time, a lifetime, to turn the ache of our longings toward Him.

We can simply want our situation solved — when God simply wants to be our answer.

And the best situation — is always what makes God your best hope.

In the middle of things seemingly not working out for us —- God is working out something in us.

Do not ever fear, ever. Simply do not ever stop patiently wait on God.

The Spirit is married to patience.

Be impatient — and you drive a wedge between you and the comfort of the Holy Spirit.

In a world of fists and demands and tight grips for control — patiently waiting with open hand is a radical act — a radical art.

Open hands defy the dark — and testify to a radical act of trust.

Grace beyond our imaginings can fall into open hands.

New things will happen to us — unknown, unwanted, unexpected things — and we can name those things grace.

All sins and brokenness — turn out to be watered by impatience.

Read more here.

Summer morning

Ann Voskamp writes at A Holy Experience,

When the sun slides down windows, beckoning us to come out now, you have time now to come out and be — it’s like hope and grace begin again with every summer day.

And these fleeting summer days unwrap like melting ice cream sandwiches, like gladiolas unfolding unabashedly glad in the garden, like monarchs unfolding out of pearled cocoons in His own perfect time.

Try, but really, are there fresher words than those two: summer morning? Summer mornings and the air thick with the spices of a thousand opening flowers and would it matter if we were one of the winged ones that lived only a handful of summer days, because we could fill those handful of open-handed days with more glory than a cynical seventy years might ever contain?

You unwrap the gifts you’ve always wanted most — when tight hands unfold into open-handed trust.

Ann's friend, photographer Esther Havens, writes,

We can choose to enjoy these moments God has given us to the fullest or let them pass us by.


This summer, I really tried to focus on thankfulness.

Thankfulness for every person’s life I get to be a part of!

We all get to be a part of the stories that are interwoven around us.

Today as I’m reflecting and writing this from Rwanda, tears fill my eyes with thankfulness.

God is good —

and His beauty surrounds us.

Read more here.

Inauguration Day, 2017

Before retiring tonight, I was in the mood for some satirical humor. Manhattan Infidel did not disappoint. He writes about his interview with Scott Walker, the Monster who does not have a college degree, but who was giving his inaugural address as President of the United States. An excerpt:

The group then unfurled a banner that read “America: Run by professionals forever. Those without degrees never!”

Our allies wanted us to make a powerful statement. A statement that said how attached we, as professionals are, to our positions as the rulers of America. We thought of perhaps bombing the inauguration. But as college educated men and women we decided to do what we do best: Write a strongly worded protest. And that’s what we have done What have you got to say for yourself Walker? Why didn’t you graduate college?

President Walker then took the microphone and uttered his rebuttal.

“I had a job.”

With that the College graduates for social justice and college degrees ceded the podium but not before complaining that President Walker could have at least given them a trigger warning before telling them that he was employed as a capitalist.

“Not only is he not a professional but he’s one of them!’ could be heard as the group left the stage.

Read more here.

The new star at Fox News

Ramin Setoodeh and Brian Steinberg write in Variety about the ever-confident Megyn Kelly of Fox News here.

Silence is how you kill the story

Mark Steyn writes that Planned Parenthood's

ministrations fall disproportionately on minority women, so in that sense it is still true to the racist and eugenicist theories of its founder, Margaret Sanger: among blacks in New York City, there are more abortions than births - a grim ratio one otherwise has to go to Russia and its satellites to find.

Will the recently released undercover videos change the perception of what Planned Parenthood does? In USA Today, Kirsten Powers (a rare pro-life Democrat) notes that PP head honcho Cecile Richards has apparently apologized for "the uncompassionate tone her senior director of medical research, Deborah Nucatola, used to explain the process by which she harvests aborted body parts to be provided for medical research". "Dr" Nucatola's "tone" is certainly arresting. As she explains to a potential organ client over lunch:

You're just kind of cognizant of where you put your graspers, you try to intentionally go above and below the thorax, so that, you know, we've been very good at getting heart, lung, liver, because we know that, so I'm not gonna crush that part, I'm gonna basically crush below, I'm gonna crush above, and I'm gonna see if I can get it all intact.

That's the easy part. But these days a lot of customers are interested in harvesting an intact brain to work on, so you gotta keep your graspers away from crushing the head - or, as "Dr" Nucatola prefers to call it, the "calvarium":

With the calvarium, in general, some people will actually try to change the presentation so that it's not vertex, because when it's vertex presentation, you never have enough dilation at the beginning of the case, unless you have real, huge amount of dilation to deliver an intact calvarium. So if you do it starting from the breech presentation, there's dilation that happens as the case goes on, and often, the last, you can evacuate an intact calvarium at the end.

The chit-chat's all nice and medical, isn't it? If it's "vertex presentation" - ie, the baby comes out head-first - it's hard to get a nice clean intact skull. But, if it's "breech" - feet-first - then "you can evacuate an intact calvarium".

If it is, as Ms Richards says, merely a "tone" problem, it's a revealing one. It's not possible to "crush" as many nine-month-old "fetuses" as "Dr" Nucatola does and still retain your humanity. If would be an unbearable burden to regard the "fetus" as a baby and the "calvarium" as a head and the "evacuation" as a birth, and still go to work in the morning. So the de-humanization is part of what's necessary to survive as an abortionist.

In her USA Today column, Kirsten Powers adds:

It's a measure of how damning the video is that Planned Parenthood's usual defenders were nowhere to be found. There was total silence from The New York Times editorial board and their 10 (out of 11) pro-abortion rights columnists. Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi — both recipients of Planned Parenthood's highest honor, the Margaret Sanger Award — have been mum.

The silence is not from shame, or from having to defend the indefensible, but part of a much colder calculation: Silence is how you kill the story, for Planned Parenthood as for Gosnell.

And that's part of the dehumanization, too. When kids are slaughtered in a Connecticut schoolhouse or churchgoers are shot down in Charleston, the media jump straight on the public policy implications: gun control, Confederate flags at state buildings... But when baby parts are sold by an organization that receives half-a-billion in taxpayer funds, there are no public policy questions at all, and it is necessary to look away. Because the realities of abortion have to be crushed and smothered by the slick, blurry evasions of "a woman's right to choose". That's a dehumanization strategy, too. When the pro-choice rally ends and Cameron Diaz, Ashley Judd and other celebrities d'un certain age return to Hollywood, and the upper-middle-class women with the one designer baby go back to their suburbs, poor and minority and under-age women are left in the abortion-industrial complex's pro-choice back alley

Read more here.

Which is more disturbing?

Mark Steyn asks,

And what's more "disrespectful"? A Trump crack? Or Obama having to be kicked and dragged to lower the flags on the White House and other federal buildings? So that what took a few hours after the Aurora movie shooting and the Connecticut school shooting takes five days, because four dead marines and a dead sailor doesn't fit his "narrative"

Trump is Trump, and mouthing off and shooting from the hip is part of who he is. Obama's chilly, calculated, bloodless indifference to victims of Islamic supremacism is part of who he is. Which, honestly, is more disturbing?

read more here.

Is this wishful thinking?

Dick Morris writes,

To the average American, the crimes of murder and rape are the most serious but to the intelligence community, it is misuse of classified materials and information. The very existence of the Intel operation demands secrecy and they do not look kindly on violations.

...As with all of Hillary’s scandals, this wound is self-inflicted. Had she not insisted on using her own server and e mail account, it would never have happened.

And, like all of her scandals, it will drag on for months or even years. It will take a long time to go through 30,000 emails and make judgments about their classification status. And a new batch of emails are going to be released by the State Department at the end of each month between now and the end of the year.

...But the underlying facts are potentially criminal and there is only a limited number of times that a secretary of state can plead ignorance about the classification status of a document.

The reason this scandal, above others, really threatens Hillary are the necks that have already been on the chopping block for this particular offense. Former CIA Director John Deutsch, General David Petraeus, and former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger have all been involved in such offenses and were punished accordingly. Deutsch was pardoned by President Clinton.

But the Intel boys take this offense seriously and are not going to look the other way. Not this time.

Read more here.

"Rent the space, pay the taxes, and that's it!"

Here are some excerpts from a fascinating article by Michael Totten in City Journal:

Vietnam officially junked Communism a mere 11 years after imposing it on South Vietnam.

State subsidies were abolished. Private businesses were allowed to operate again. Businessmen, investors, and employees could keep their profits and wages. Farmers could sell their produce on the open market and keep the proceeds instead of giving them up to the state. The results were spectacular. It took some time for a middle class to emerge, but from 1993 to 2004, the percentage of Vietnamese living in poverty dropped from 60 percent to 20 percent. Before Doi Moi, the command economy contracted, and inflation topped out at over 700 percent; it would eventually shrink to single digits. After years of chronic rice shortages, Vietnam became the world’s second-largest exporter of rice, after Thailand. Progress hasn’t slowed. In 2013, Vietnam’s economy grew by 8.25 percent. “The number of malls, shopping districts, and restaurants is amazing compared with when I was a kid,” says motivational speaker Hoan Do. “Eighteen years ago, the entire country was broken down. There was hardly any technology, but now even poor people can go to an Internet café and log on to Facebook and YouTube.”

The city is extremely business-friendly. I asked a local man who works for an American company how hard it is for foreigners to invest and go into business in Hanoi. “The Vietnamese government makes it easy,” he says. “Just present them with a business plan, tell them what you want to do, and you’re good to go.” The same goes for small businesses. All you have to do, he says, “is rent the space, pay the taxes, and that’s it.”

...I could only imagine how a Cuban would feel if he found himself whisked here from Havana with a ration card in his pocket and his state-imposed maximum wage of 20 dollars a month in his wallet. The only “mall” I saw anywhere in Cuba was a dismal space, located inside a concrete box that looked like a parking garage and offering only the most meager selection of wares. I’ve been to better malls in Iraq.

Despite having terrible relations with China, Hanoi is explicitly following Beijing’s economic and political model. The trade-off is simple: the state will yield on economic freedom as long as citizens don’t demand political freedom. Princeton professor and China expert Perry Link describes the bargain as, “shut up and I’ll let you get rich.” So far, it’s working in both countries. Perhaps none of this should be surprising. “Vietnam was never all that ideologically Communist,” former U.S. ambassador to Vietnam Pete Peterson says. “It was always more socialist and nationalist. I told them they should stop calling themselves the Communist Party, but I didn’t get anywhere with it. Everybody pays for everything over there, including health care. The government hardly provides anything. Sweden is more socialist than Vietnam.”

I asked one Hanoi resident what the word “Communism” means today in Vietnam. “Communism today just means we’re run by one political party,” he said. “Some people complain about that, but it doesn’t matter to me as long as the government creates a good business and living environment, and it does. I don’t want different political parties competing with each other and creating a crisis like in Thailand.” He may not mind one-party rule, but plenty of Vietnamese do. The government has created the conditions for the kind of middle-class revolt that erupted in Taiwan and South Korea before those countries matured into multiparty democracies.

Vietnam is enjoying a holiday from history, basking in the prosperous and relatively “free” post-totalitarian phase of its evolution. Amid all the economic and cultural dynamism, the state is a weirdly distant anachronism, its billboards and slogans as out of place as World War II posters would be in America now. Over a ubiquitous public-address system, the party still blares “news” into the streets and into everyone’s home each morning and evening, but the Vietnamese I talked with dismissed it as “just propaganda.” Not just the ideology but the state itself feels almost irrelevant to anyone who isn’t an outspoken dissident. Controlling Vietnam’s people and imposing order on its freewheeling chaos is an exercise in futility. No-honking signs and traffic regulations are routinely flouted, as are parking restrictions. I saw two police officers pull up in a car across the street from my hotel and yell at people through a bullhorn to move their motorbikes off the sidewalk. They complied, but less than five minutes after the policemen drove off, the space filled up again.

...Vietnamese anti-Americanism scarcely exists. What we call the Vietnam War, and what they call the American War, casts no shadow—especially not in the South, which fought on the American side, but not even in Hanoi, a city heavily bombed by the United States. I saw no evidence that the U.S. (or anyone else) ever bombed Hanoi. All the damage has apparently been repaired, and most Vietnamese are under the age of 30—too young to remember it, anyway.

Perhaps it’s not so remarkable that the Vietnamese have moved on. Most Americans don’t hold grudges for long, either, after the furies of war have subsided. Hardly any of us hate the Japanese, the Germans, or the Vietnamese. We rightly despise the Taliban and Isis, but not the innocent people of Afghanistan or Iraq. So the Vietnamese aren’t unique for being emotionally mature about history—but they do contrast with some, especially in the Middle East, who can’t get past even the most ancient of grievances. George Santayana famously said that those who can’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it, to which P. J. O’Rourke added, with the Arab-Israeli conflict in mind, that “it goes double for those who can’t remember anything else.”

Today, both the Vietnamese people and government—in the north as well as the south—view Americans as allies. The leaders are Communists who voluntarily embarked on a journey of economic dynamism and friendship with the United States, first abandoning and then reversing everything they once fought and died for. They’re prospering as a result. May the same one day happen in Havana and Pyongyang.

Read more here.

"Spook words"

Do you know about Project "Seen"? Big Fur Hat writes at iOTW.com,

Artist, Emile Kozole, has developed a typeface that will strike through any words that the NSA has identified as “spook words” that will put you on their radar as a potential threat.

You can try out words on his site HERE.

Oddly, the term Bugs Bunny was flagged.

Read more here.