At Drunken Stepfather, "STEPLINKS OF THE DAY."
And some young Asian titties:Gotta love big titty Asians pic.twitter.com/YmeIWq4SsL
— TRY NOT TO GET A BONER (@dontgetboner) December 5, 2020
Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education - from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
At Drunken Stepfather, "STEPLINKS OF THE DAY."
And some young Asian titties:Gotta love big titty Asians pic.twitter.com/YmeIWq4SsL
— TRY NOT TO GET A BONER (@dontgetboner) December 5, 2020
Now Sweden decides to lock down, eh?
I guess building up national herd immunity was taking too long. Too many dying. It's bitch, girl.
Sweden’s Covid-19 experiment is over. After a late autumn surge in infections led to rising hospitalizations and deaths, the government has abandoned its attempt—unique among Western nations—to combat the pandemic through voluntary measures. Like other Europeans, Swedes are now heading into the winter facing restrictions ranging from a ban on large gatherings to curbs on alcohol sales and school closures—all aimed at preventing the country’s health system from being swamped by patients and capping what is already among the highest per capita death tolls in the world. The clampdown, which started last month, put an end to a hands-off approach that had made the Scandinavian nation a prime example in the often heated global debate between opponents and champions of pandemic lockdowns. Admirers of the Swedish way as far as the U.S. hailed its benefit to the economy and its respect for fundamental freedoms. Critics called it a gamble with human lives, especially those of the most vulnerable. With its shift in strategy, the government is now siding with those advocating at least some mandatory restrictions. When the pathogen swept across Europe in March, Sweden broke with much of the continent and opted not to impose mask-wearing and left known avenues of viral transmission such as bars and nightclubs open, leaving it to citizens to take their own precautions. As late as last month, Swedes enjoyed mass sporting and cultural events and health-care officials insisted that the voluntary measures were enough to spare the country the resurgence in infections that was sweeping Europe. Weeks later, with total Covid-19-related deaths reaching almost 700 per million inhabitants, infections growing exponentially and hospital wards filling up, the government made a U-turn. In an emotional televised address on Nov. 22, Prime Minister Stefan Löfven pleaded with Swedes to cancel all nonessential meetings and announced a ban on gatherings of more than eight people, which triggered the closure of cinemas and other entertainment venues. Starting Monday, high schools will be closed. “Authorities chose a strategy totally different to the rest of Europe, and because of it the country has suffered a lot in the first wave,” said Piotr Nowak, a physician working with Covid-19 patients at the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm. “We have no idea how they failed to predict the second wave.” Last week Sweden’s total coronavirus death count crossed 7,000. Neighboring Denmark, Finland and Norway, all similar-sized countries, have recorded since the start of the pandemic 878, 415 and 354 deaths respectively. For the first time since World War II, Sweden’s neighbors have closed their borders with the country. “We don’t like to say that Sweden has been the black sheep, but it has been the different sheep,” said Vivikka Richt, spokeswoman of the Finnish health ministry. Dr. Nowak said medical personnel had never shared the optimism of the country’s public-health agency about so-called herd immunity—population-wide resistance to a pathogen acquired through gradual exposure—and had repeatedly warned that the virus couldn’t be controlled with voluntary measures alone. One reason Sweden stuck to its approach for so long despite the warning signs is the high degree of independence and authority enjoyed by the health agency and other similar state bodies under Swedish law. The public face of the country’s pandemic strategy was Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist. Dr. Tegnell declined to be interviewed this week, but in earlier conversations with The Wall Street Journal and other media he said lockdowns were unsustainable and unnecessary. His agency has continued to discourage mask-wearing just as the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, a European Union agency whose headquarters are located near Dr. Tegnell’s office in Stockholm, recommends wearing them.Still more.
Joe Biden is asked about his disagreements with Kamala Harris on certain issues:
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) December 4, 2020
"Like I told Barack, if I reach something where there's a fundamental disagreement we have based on a moral principle, I'll develop some disease and say I have to resign." pic.twitter.com/SLcvrwaPCA
FIND YOUR WILL, FIND YOUR DISCIPLINE--AND YOU WILL FIND YOUR FREEDOM.
Jocko Willink's methods for success were born in the SEAL Teams, where he spent most of his adult life, enlisting after high school and rising through the ranks to become the commander of the most highly decorated special operations unit of the war in Iraq. In Discipline Equals Freedom, the #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of Extreme Ownership describes how he lives that mantra: the mental and physical disciplines he imposes on himself in order to achieve freedom in all aspects of life...
Shelby Steele’s new film takes a critical look at the prevailing narrative. It’s now under ‘content review.’ August was the sixth anniversary of the death of Michael Brown, the black teenager who was shot dead by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo. The incident, and the nationwide coverage it attracted, marked the beginning of a period of mass protests against police, which culminated (let’s hope) after the tragic death of George Floyd in Minneapolis this May. The fashionable explanation for what happened to Brown, Floyd and others—such as Freddie Gray in 2015 and Philando Castile in 2016—is so-called systemic racism. The activist left and the mainstream media insist that law enforcement targeted these men because they were black—and that if they weren’t black, they would still be alive. The truth is more complicated and less politically correct, and it’s the subject of an engrossing new documentary that is scheduled to premiere Oct. 16. The film, titled “What Killed Michael Brown?,” is written and narrated by the noted race scholar Shelby Steele and directed by his son, Eli Steele. Readers of these pages probably know the elder Mr. Steele through his best-selling books and occasional Journal op-eds. But earlier in his career, Mr. Steele also won acclaim for his work in television. In 1990 he co-wrote and produced “Seven Days in Bensonhurst,” an Emmy-winning documentary about Yusef Hawkins, the black teenager from Brooklyn who was fatally shot in 1989 after he and some friends were attacked by a white mob. In an interview this week, Mr. Steele, who is based at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, explained the significance of Brown’s death and what it tells us about race relations today. “Michael Brown represented, even more so than Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray and others, the distortion of truth, of reality,” he said. Mr. Steele added that when it comes to racial controversies, liberals have developed what he calls a “poetic truth,” which may be at complete odds with objective truth but nevertheless helps them advance a desirable narrative. In the case of Michael Brown, reality was turned on its head. “It was almost absolute,” Mr. Steele said. “The language—he was ‘executed,’ he was ‘assassinated,’ ‘hands up, don’t shoot’—it was a stunning example of poetic truth, of the lies that a society can entertain in pursuit of power.” Despite ample forensic evidence, the grand-jury reports and the multiple Justice Department investigations clearing the police officer of any wrongdoing, “there are blacks today, right now in Ferguson, as I point out in the film, who still truly believe that Michael Brown was killed out of racial animus,” he said. “In a microcosm, that’s where race relations are today. The truth has no chance. It’s smothered by the politics of victimization.” Yet Mr. Steele sees a better future, and the interviews highlighted in “What Killed Michael Brown?” help to explain his optimism. One of the film’s strong suits is showcasing the words and deeds of everyday community leaders in places like Ferguson, St. Louis and Chicago. These people are far more focused on black self-development than on badgering whites or blaming society for problems in poor black communities. They understand and accept objective truth but mostly toil in obscurity while liberal billionaires cut million-dollar checks to subsidize Black Lives Matter activism and antiracism gibberish from “woke” academics. “It’s easy to say, ‘The white man, the white man,’ and point the finger,” says a pastor in the film whose church is located in one of Chicago’s most violent neighborhoods. “In reality, we have to take a very close look at ourselves.” His focus is on “the transformation of the person. And we’re telling them, hey, educationally, you gotta get it together. Economically, you gotta get it together. Family and spiritually, you gotta get it together. And you have to take responsibility.” The president of the St. Louis NAACP chapter told Mr. Steele there was no evidence that the Ferguson protests had done anything to help the black people who live there. Property values have fallen, crime has increased, and schools continue to underperform. “Let’s be clear. The progressive agenda is not the black agenda,” he says. “The people in that community are no better off than they were prior to the death of that young black child. They’re no better off, and everybody knows it.” Amazon, which was scheduled to stream the movie, is now having second thoughts and has placed it under “content review.” Eli Steele, the director, told me that he will resort to other streaming platforms if he has to and is referring people to the film’s website, WhatKilledMichaelBrown.com, for more details on how to view it. The progressive agenda may not be the black agenda, but it is the media’s agenda. Sadly, speaking plain truths about racial inequality in America today remains controversial.More here.
Ms. Rania's further to the kooked-out left than Max Blumenthal, but she's a killer performance artist, and hot.
Unlike previous recessions, this one is making it especially difficult for parents, women in particular, to work because of school closures and the loss of child care. https://t.co/tMz82YGdnX
— Catherine Lucey (@catherine_lucey) December 3, 2020
It's the school newspaper. I'm not linking, But they were fair. And I must have been particularly loquacious.
Two political science professors at Long Beach City College provided their insight into the presidential election. Since the country has received the news that previous vice president, Joe Biden, would become the 46th president of the United States, the country has been hit with many questions, some being about voter fraud and what to expect in the upcoming weeks. “Trump and his campaign will continue to challenge the election, in public opinion and in the courts. Trump’s supporters claim this was a ‘stolen election,’ but so far, there’s been little hard proof (of massive fraud in particular, at least from what I’ve seen),” said political science professor, Donald Douglas, who has been teaching at Long Beach City College since 2000. Douglas shared more of his insight to what is currently happening in the country. “The problem, of course, is that everybody’s going to view the whole thing from their own partisan perspective. Trump and his supporters say he was robbed. Democrats say Biden is the president-elect. It all seems like a blur. Mostly, we’ll have to let the legal process play out. Trump’s campaign has filed at least 16 lawsuits in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It doesn’t look like things are going all that well so far, but it’s complicated,” said Douglas. Douglas shared information on the requirements every state has for the election. “The 50 states are required to submit their final election certifications to Congress by December 14th, when members of the Electoral College are set to meet. If Trump’s legal challenges go to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the final winner of the majority of the Electoral College vote is disputed, a decision will come before December 14th. In 2000, the Supreme Court ruled in Bush v. Gore on December 12th, stopping the recount in Florida, leaving Bush ahead in the state and delivering Florida’s electors to Bush, and victory in the Electoral College,” he said. A possible Supreme Court case in the future leaves some uncertainty on who will take office on January 20. Douglas discussed the different possibilities that could take place. “There won’t be a temporary vacancy of the office of presidency. Trump will absolutely serve out his term until January 20th, and most likely Joe Biden will be sworn in. It’s complicated, but if there was a tie in the Electoral College, or if Congress refused to accept the certification of elections from a state or a number of states, Congress would have to vote to choose the winner, and the vote is by state delegations.” Matthew Atkinson, a political science professor at Long Beach City College since 2016, also had more insight on this possibility. “The rules are very specific, I don’t think that there are any states where the election is so close that the courts are going to throw the electors into limbo,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any possibility that these recounts or lawsuits would change any of the outcomes. I think Biden has by now had more than enough votes to lose one of the states that contested. I don’t think he’ll lose any of them but even if he did, he still has enough Electoral College votes in,” said Atkinson. Despite the uncertainty still on who will be sworn into office this upcoming January, it was a tight race throughout the entire election. Joe Biden won with 306 electoral college votes, and President Donald Trump with 232 electoral college votes. Why was this election so close? “Overall turnout was 66 percent of eligible voters, the highest turnout since 1900. Quite simply, more people voted. And Trump increased his numbers from 2016. The movement to “Keep America Great” is here to stay. It’s going to be a powerful and enduring factor of American politics for a long time, long after Trump’s retired from the scene. Democrats are worried, and rightly so. They lost seats in Congress. They failed to win back the majority in the Senate, and the two Georgia runoff elections to the Senate are a long shot for the party. And Democrats failed to win back the majority in any state legislature. Except for the presidential race, it was a bad night for Democrats and the left,” said Douglas. This election had the highest voter turnout compared to every past election. Atkinson said, “Through most of the late 20th century, voters didn’t really feel like that there was much at stake in the election and they certainly didn’t feel like there was an option for them that was important or exciting for a lot of Democratic voters.” “It’s the top down mobilizing effect where it’s the parties and the politicians investing the resources and getting people to turn out to vote because that’s essential, and then there’s the bottom up people all of a sudden waking up and saying, oh wow, this is really important and start talking about it,” said Atkinson. “If people sustain this level of voting, it would be really good for democracy, because it is good for Democratic representation,” said Atkinson. “A lot can happen, but should gridlock reign in Washington, it’s going to be rough for the party in the 2022 midterms, with a strong possibility of Republicans retaking majority control of that chamber two years before the 2024 election,” said Douglas.
At Areo:
If the astounding fact that Donald Trump received a greater share of non-white people’s votes in 2020 than any Republican president since 1960 reveals anything at all, it’s that this past summer’s racial reckoning didn’t resonate with many. In contrast to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, which found expression in historic legislation, the results of this year’s cultural upheavals have been more symbolic than substantive. Statues were toppled—not just of confederates but of abolitionists and national founders; defund the police became the impromptu battle cry of progressive activists; dissenters like James Bennett, David Shor, Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan were fired from or pressured to leave their jobs for refusing to acquiesce. But, despite the fact that major corporations from Walmart to Goldman Sachs, along with almost every major media outlet, celebrity and cultural institution came out in full support of Black Lives Matter, conspicuously few national policies advocating structural reforms in policing have emerged as a result.
A sharp uptick in violent crime and homicides was the predictable outcome of the widespread anti-police sentiment galvanized by Black Lives Matter. Rioting caused billions of dollars in property damage in largely minority neighborhoods and dozens of lives were lost. It would be a terrible irony if a movement ostensibly dedicated to preserving black lives inadvertently cost more of them than it saved.
Trump’s gains among non-white, women and LGBTQ voters (and his setbacks among white male voters) have not stopped some progressives from blaming the unprecedented turnout of support for him on white supremacy, patriarchy and racism. Charles Blow, for example, has commented, “All of this to me points to the power of the white patriarchy and the coattail it has of those who depend on it or aspire to it … Some people who have historically been oppressed will stand with the oppressors, and will aspire to power by proximity.” Likewise Roxane Gay has asserted, “The way this election has played out shouldn’t be a surprise if you’ve been paying attention or if you understand racism and how systemic it really is.” Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted that the Latino vote for Trump can be attributed to the whiteness of certain Hispanic ethnic groups. But the much more parsimonious answer is that demography is not destiny.
This is an ideology incapable of adapting to new information. Modern, race-conscious antiracism is not just a political affiliation, like libertarianism or democratic socialism. The sense of meaning it provides in our increasingly secular society has turned it into a quasi-religious belief system that grow stronger in the face of disconfirmatory information. If our political identity is our primary source of morality, any challenge to our political worldview will be perceived as an existential threat. In modern anti-racism, resistance to reality is more of a feature than a bug.
The misplaced assumption that racism killed George Floyd virtually guaranteed a disproportionate and jumbled response. The ostensible concerns of BLM—racial profiling in policing and the lack of accountability and transparency among officers—are laudable and well substantiated. But it was no coincidence that race and racism, rather than structural policing issues, quickly became the main issue.
Police killings of unarmed people of any race are exceedingly rare in the US (there were only about 55 last year). The group most targeted by police are the poor. Interracial violence is extremely uncommon and black police officers may be just as likely to kill black suspects as white officers. White people are regularly killed by police and in higher absolute numbers than black people. The death of a white man called Tony Timpa, who was killed in nearly identical circumstances to Floyd’s attracted little interest. The discomfiting reality is that racial gaps in policing start to close when we account for differences in crime rates and frequency of encounters with police. Any honest conversation about policing must also take into account the around 400 million guns circulating in the population along with America’s disproportionate rates of violent crime in relation to our peer countries. Around 81% of black Americans want as much or more policing in their communities as they currently have. All these facts have been ignored and treated as extraneous, at best. Those who raised them are often viewed with suspicion. Questioning whether racism really killed George Floyd opens one up to the charge of being a racist oneself. To be against Black Lives Matter is framed as being against black lives. To be against the current form antiracism has taken is framed as being in favor of racism. This discourages honest conversation.
It doesn’t have to be this way. If the advocates of anti-racism could address its two major blind spots—historical determinism and race essentialism—a better version would emerge. We can mitigate the lingering effects of racism in society without resorting to the same moral logic that gave rise to white supremacy in the first place: the use of group identity as a means to power and absolution. Any successful antiracist movement must begin with the premise that race is a fiction...Still more.
At Drunken Stepfather, "STEPLINKS OF THE DAY."
⏩ IG: ( luna.benna ) pic.twitter.com/zMNacdD1e5
— HottieYeep (@HottieYeep) November 26, 2020
╭═➤ ✰ ✯ IG: raphabonas ✯ ✰
— vagarymodels (@vagarymodels) November 21, 2020
🇲╔══╗⋆∘・゚゚・・:⋆∘∵⋰◦⋆∘
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╰═➤⏩ @HotGirlsZ0ne @BadBab3s ⏪ pic.twitter.com/YbcgGZiD6z
This is pretty cool, at NYT, "A goal of the SharkEye project is to one day produce automated “shark reports” for beachgoers to help them gauge levels of risk."
Fock Newsom. Just fock 'im and his focking French Laundry.
At LAT, "Californians must mask up outside their homes under new expanded mandate."
New expanded bullshit. I wear my mask when I go out. I don't want any hassles, mostly, but I don't like.
I will never go back to teaching if I'm required to wear a mask. That's my line in the sand.
Lame.
She's a lawyer and political consultant by training. She's way out of her league.
At USA Today, "Live politics updates: Neera Tanden, Biden's pick for budget chief, draws fire from left and right."
BONUS: Glenn Greenwald, "Biden Appointee Neera Tanden Spread the Conspiracy That Russian Hackers Changed Hillary's 2016 Votes to Trump."
Why, oh why, is the Chinese minister's tweet not flagged as "disinformation" by the "woke" Twitter memory-hole apparatchiks?
You know the answer. Big Tech, Big Pharma, the NBA, they're all in the tank for Beijing and they greedily grab for the potential market of billions and billions of endless consumers. Truth and decency be focking damned.
And at the Syndey Morning Herald, "China fires back at Morrison, doubles down on war crimes accusation."
So brazen. I'd personally like to kick Chinese diplomat Zhao Lijian right in the teeth.
Australia’s prime minister condemned what he called a fabricated image tweeted by a Chinese official. The post showed an Australian soldier with a knife to the throat of an Afghan child. https://t.co/L1MMIMqXRJ
— The New York Times (@nytimes) November 30, 2020
Shocked by murder of Afghan civilians & prisoners by Australian soldiers. We strongly condemn such acts, &call for holding them accountable. pic.twitter.com/GYOaucoL5D
— Lijian Zhao 赵立坚 (@zlj517) November 30, 2020
Jake Paul should get in the ring with Mike Tyson. That'd be worth it, lol.
At Sporting News, "Jake Paul vs. Nate Robinson fight results: YouTube star wins with brutal KO."
[That just reminded me: "The Great White Hope"? (Wiki.)]
Short knockout video here.
I'm been giddy about this, especially because radical leftists and Democrats (but I repeat myself) have no clue. I've been shouting this from the rooftops to family members and friends since the election. I'm now dead to them, especially my older sister (who calls me "Mr. Republican," which I'm most definitely not, lol) and her friends.
At the Minneapolis Tribune, "While Democrats powered through cities and suburbs to reclaim the White House, the party slid further behind in huge rural swaths of northern battlegrounds."
I'm trying to cut down on the number of shows I'm streaming --- or else I'll have time for nothing else, man. You can get sucked into non-stop streaming pretty fast when you're facing endless Democrat Party lockdowns.
I'm watching football today, but maybe I'll sample episode one tonight.
At AoSHQ, "Saturday Afternoon Chess thread 11-28-2020."
And at the Guardian U.K., "'It's electrifying': chess world hails Queen's Gambit-fuelled boom."
Live from 1978:
And at the comments:
"Lou Graham's voice was simply amazing in his prime. He is right up there with Steven Tyler, Freddie Mercury, et al... Pick your legendary hard rock or metal singer - Cornell, Plant, Rogers, Daltry, Zander, Dickinson, Halford, Hagar. Graham holds his own with any of them. Legend!"
Of course that was the goal. Why even post such journalistic speculation except as a massive gaslighting operation.
At NYT (FWIW), "Assassination in Iran Could Limit Biden’s Options."
Are you surprised? You're certainly not entertained.
At LAT, "A more sweeping stay-at-home order is likely if L.A. County can’t slow COVID-19 spike."
I work in Los Angeles County, so this directly affects me, as my college will remain closed, not just because of the county, though it's that, but because of the state government's panic too. Where're all the economic relief payments to families and businesses (already!) devastated by these catastrophic shutdowns? My goodness.
From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "IT’S THE WINTER OF LOVE ON STATEN ISLAND: NYC Pub Borrows a Page From Leftists in Lockdown Dispute."
It takes carbons to fuel an automobile. Electricity is most effectively generated for industrial-scale use by fossil fuels, especially coal. But coal's out if you're a leftist. These idiots don't understand that wind, solar, and hydro will never provide enough energy to meet current demand, not in Britain, not in the U.S, and certainly not worldwide, where poor countries are still decades if not centuries behind the West in terms of their political-economic (especially industrial and scientific) modernization.
But these are the times in which we live, and we've got mountains to move before we can finally crush the left and save Western civilization. We'll do it. But it takes time. (More about that later.)
In any case, at Dana Pico's Journal 14, "Out of juice: What happens when you can't find a working charging station for your plug in electric vehicle?":
BONUS: At London's Daily Mail, "‘Bet they wish they had gas!’ Chaos in California as Tesla drivers are stranded for hours in a half-a-mile-long line to charge their cars on Black Friday: Shanon Stellini was travelling through Kettleman City on November 30 when she stumbled across around 50 of the electric cars waiting in line for a recharge."If you have a plug-in electric car, you'd better have a fossil fueled second car if you want to go further than just tooling around town. https://t.co/A6VHIolJU1 British couple takes nine hours to make 130 mile trip because they can't find a working charging station. pic.twitter.com/aANkxEVOo7
— Dana Pico (@Dana19707 on Parler.com) (@Dana_TFSJ) November 29, 2020
Well, it was 1976, for some context. He's a little out of control, obviously. And at a live concert, basically telling immigrants to leave, they're not welcomed? Man, that's harsh.
But Britain was a shithole country in the 1970s and Labour policies were destroying the very fabric of society. Maybe Clapton's message was actually resonating with people, with his fans. But that was then and this is now. There's no way a performer can get away with saying anything like that nowadays, not even with the context and no matter how true. In fact, you know celebrities are ALWAYS cancelled for exactly the truth they speak on topics the left thought they'd already silenced through their campaigns of intimidation and violence.
And, this isn't really a new issue. He apologized for his previous comments in 2018, but this is the age of the Twitter rage mob, so no one's safe. Absolutely nobody.
All the racism wouldn’t fit in one screenshot pic.twitter.com/8xu2hZkt6S
— Deren Ney (@DerenNey) November 27, 2020
Leftists destroyed this man's life as a political vendetta. He was convicted on a "process" crime with no substantial underlying linkage to the allegations of electoral collusion with the Russians.
Now he's received a presidential pardon, but how does someone rebuild one's life --- a life of patriotism and exemplary national service --- after a diabolical ideological smear campaign like this?
Thank goodness for President Trump.
Background at NPR, "Trump Pardons Michael Flynn, Who Pleaded Guilty to Lying About Russia Contact, and at NYT (with fear and trepidation, lol), "Trump’s Pardon of Flynn Signals Prospect of a Wave in His Final Weeks in Office."
And for the analysis, see Grim's Hall, "Michael Flynn Pardoned":
It is my Great Honor to announce that General Michael T. Flynn has been granted a Full Pardon. Congratulations to @GenFlynn and his wonderful family, I know you will now have a truly fantastic Thanksgiving!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 25, 2020
In a particularly grueling miscarriage of justice, retired general Michael Flynn had to be pardoned for a crime of which he was innocent. Investigated by the FBI at the behest of President Obama, who decided for some reason that Flynn was a Russian spy, Flynn was cleared of all charges as a result of the investigation. The FBI closed the case.
He was prosecuted anyway by a politicized Department of Justice, which nevertheless failed to produce the only piece of evidence it allegedly had against him. That evidence would have been the original "302" form showing that the FBI agents who interviewed him thought that he'd lied to them -- about a case in which the FBI had already cleared him. No such 302 was ever produced, allegedly being lost, but we do have one that we happen to know was edited long after the fact by disgraced liar and political agent Peter Strzok. We know this because he discussed it in unencrypted text messages with his lover, also-married disgraced former prosecutor Lisa Page.
After a financially ruinous prosecution in which the FBI/DOJ produced almost none of the exculpatory evidence that the law requires them to produce -- including the record of the investigation that completely cleared him on all charges -- Flynn's sorry lawyers convinced him to plead guilty. This was done in such a way that the DOJ and his sorry lawyers (perhaps motivated by one of their partners, a former Obama attorney general) made an illegal deal to hide the agreement not to prosecute Flynn's son from the judge! Not only did the judge lack the information he needed to discern whether the guilty plea was coerced, anyone against whom Flynn later might have testified as a result of the deal would have been denied their constitutional right to know of the deal so they could raise it as a defense against the value of his testimony.
That judge -- a personal friend of Obama's, it turns out -- wasn't upset about the fact that the law firm and the DOJ conspired to hide these facts from him in violation of the law. His ire was for Flynn, whom he accused of selling out his country even though the DOJ had never even attempted to charge Flynn with that. What they charged him with was perjury for "lying" to the FBI (in the vanished 302), and a paperwork violation for which the FBI investigation had already cleared him.
(They cleared him of the FARA violation because he had in fact filed paperwork with the government under another act, on the advice of lawyers he hired specifically to help him meet the legal reporting requirements -- thus, he had not tried to hide his lobbying work for a NATO ally, and clearly they could not s how criminal intent. DOJ knew all of that and made him plead guilty to it anyway, if he wanted them not to send his son to prison on trumped-up charges too.)
Then we spent a year while Flynn's new lawyer, Sidney Powell, managed to get all the exculpatory information illegally hidden from him in the first place. None of it convinced the judge one bit to let Flynn withdraw the coerced guilty plea, nor to accept the DOJ's determination that it should probably actually drop those baseless charges after all. Ordered to drop the charges by the DC Court of Appeals in a three-judge ruling, the judge instead sought en banc approval to continue the case. He was granted it, provided he would dispose of the matter with "dispatch." That was now several months ago, and instead of disposing of the case he has been dragging it out towards an obvious intent to sentence Flynn in spite of his innocence.
What this case shows is how completely distorted our system has become...Still more.
Oh these daughters make my blood boil.
Sure, these parents are literally imbeciles, especially for the fact that for all they did to get their daughters into an "elite" private university (U.S.C.'s not "elite," but that's another story), their daughters couldn't care less. Olivia Jade even attacked her mom when the scandal broke --- she slammed her for getting arrested, because it ruined her career as a YouTube influencer. The youth generation is the greatest generation of spoiled, no-talent trust-fund brats. This story has always blown me away.
Lori Loughlin's daughter Isabella Rose Giannulli, 22, relaxes at a luxury Santa Barbara resort as her parents languish in jail https://t.co/ob4otPcae3
— Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) November 27, 2020
Her parents' prison time seemed a distant memory as she relaxed with a dark-haired male companion wearing a dark t-shirt and blue shorts and joked around, appearing to bury her feet in the sand at one point.
Rooms at the luxury beachside getaway currently start from $806 per night, with many boasting views across the ocean.
It's a far cry from the current dwellings of her parents who are both serving time in California prisons for their parts in the college admissions scandal.
Loughlin, 56, started her two-month sentence at FCI Dublin in California on October 30.
She is said to have been a 'wreck' during her first few weeks behind bars.
A former inmate turned prison consultant told DailyMail.com this month that the mom-of-two was 'anxious about contracting COVID, is living off a diet of dry cereal and fruit and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, is sharing a cell with three other inmates and is only allowed to shower three times a week.
Still more.
Morning everybody.
All is right in the blog world, as I've gotten an Instatlanche this morning: "WHEN FRENCH INTELLECTUALS THINK THE AMERICAN LEFT HAS GOTTEN TOO CRAZY…"
Linked there, at my piece, is Assistant Village Idiot, who logically should be getting a tertiary Instalanche: "Critical Race Theory."
And at the Other McCain, "In the Mailbox: 11.27.20 (Evening Edition)."
More at Maggie's Farm, "Saturday morning links."
Found there, at Power Line, "MORE EVIDENCE THAT LIBERALS HATE AMERICA."
At AoSHQ, "Thanksgiving ONT."
Proof Positive, "Best of the Web."
At Pirate's Cove, "Clapton, Van Morrison Team Up For Anti-Lockdown Anthem."
Theo's, "Cartoon Roundup.
At Director Blue, "Larwyn’s Linx: Pennsylvania State Legislature Files Resolution to Dispute Statewide 2020 Election Results."
BONUS: At 90 Miles From Tyranny, "Report Claims Fox News Is Blacklisting Guests Who Appear on Newsmax TV..."
I love this story. I love all this winning. We've taken out Iran's terror mastermind Qassem Soleimani, and now their top doomsday scientist.
Big story, but no matter where you find it among the MSM outlets, this is a supposed to be a bad thing. Why? It looks good on President Trump and his Middle East policy. It looks good on U.S. strategy of isolating Iran behind a ring of new strategic alliances. And it affirms Israel's role once again as the undisputed hegemon in the region and the linchpin of the American the alliance posture there. I mean, all the recent peace deals, and the breakneck diplomacy? Not bad. Not bad. That is, unless you think the Obama administration's $400 billion quid pro quo pallets of cash was okey-dokey!
It's such a damn shame Biden and his fanatical appeasers are coming back to power. They won't have long though. They won't have time to fuck things up, unless Biden goes all Obama and starts yet another Middle East war.
At the Times of Israel, "US, world leaders mum on Fakhrizadeh killing; ex-CIA chief calls hit ‘reckless’." And at J.Post, "Iran's Rouhani blames Israel for killing of nuclear scientist.
And FWIW, CBS's Margaret Brennen with last nigh report:
... Maybe head out to the (Chinese?) market and do some shopping? With luck you'll bump carts (or private parts?) with an absolutely amazing woman like this, dang! (Via Funky Links.)
One hundred French intellectuals have signed a letter backing the recent comments from French Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer.
See the Unz Review, "France: Prominent Academics and Macron Administration Attack American Anti-Racist Ideology as "Anti-White":100 prominent French academics signed a letter affirming Blanquer’s statement, and calling for the French people to defeat an “American” ideology that preaches hatred of “whites” (a word that, unlike Trump, they explicitly used) and the indigenous Gallo-Romans of France. While the academics and Blanquer primarily blame Saudi-funded Islamist preachers for the death of Samuel Paty, they also believe US influence on their intellectuals has made it socially acceptable to murder white people.
In an interview with a French journal, Blanquer reiterated this sentiment...
Thanks to our magnificent Constitution, the various state legislatures have complete control of the electoral process. Not judges, not unelected bureaucrats, and not the "media" (also see: an infographic on Georgia's provable vote fraud issues). Thanks to Sidney Powell and her team, please note the following, massive vote fraud likely perpetrated in Michigan.
Click through for all the links and the complete infographic.
Remember, it's always the affluent intellectuals who form the "vanguard" of radical movements, waving the red flag at the head of the worldwide proletarian revolution. Che Guevara was trained as a physician. Ho Chi Minh was the son of Confucian scholar and teacher, and after literally traveling the world, he received his political education in Paris, that destitute human hellscape of haute couture, Impressionism, the Guide Michelin, and world-foundational enlightenment philosophy. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Comrade Lenin) actually enjoyed a comfortable petite middle-class status and studied physics and mathematics at Kazan Imperial University, one of the top technical institutes in Russia at the time. He was expelled for "revolutionary activities." Stalin was the son of Besarion Jughashvili, a shoemaker and successful small-business owner who ultimately cracked under pressure and descended into a long drunken vodka vacation. Son Joseph (Joseph Besarionis dzе Jughashvili a.k.a Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin) was a very promising student who attended the Orthodox Spiritual Seminary in Tbilisi, Georgia, on a generous scholarship. He'd been mentored by Father Christopher Charkviani into the Orthodox priest-pipeline, a promising career path to economic stability (if not wealth and prosperity). Mao Zedong, as a child, was raised in a wealthy family in Hunan Province. He attended the First Normal School of Changsha, one of the best educational institutions in regions --- and he then quickly absorbed himself in all kinds of anti-imperialist revolutionary agitprop, naturally. Béla Kun, the leader of the Hungarian Revolution of 1919, received an education at the "upper class" Silvania Főgimnázium (the Silvania National College), a prestigious bilingual high school in Zalău, Romania. It was Béla Kun who, in 1919, led the fight against counterrevolutionary troop units, crushing the incipient counter-rebellion, which resulted in 1,000s of dead and tortured over a two-year period (1919–1921) known as Hungary's "White Terror."
These people are not the product of the capitalist "lumpenproletariat," that most despised and downtrodden class in all of Marxist-Leninist theory.
And so it goes: For America's sheltered Millennial youth of today, as entitled as they are --- because of racism, sexism, microaggressions, homophobia, transphobia, settler colonialism, genocide of indigenous peoples, the "environment," and (of course) Israel --- the solution is the burn it all down in an apocalyptic ideological war against phantom "oppressors."
Gird your loins, people. They're coming after you. Sooner or later, they'll have your name and number (listed in the new regime's social media social credit system database, built in collaboration with the recently nationalized ideological-purity industry firms of Silicon Valley, now elevated under the new Biden politburo as the Big Tech Komsomol Thought Crimes Sanitary Correction Unit). Get ready for Kamala's "Truth and Reconciliation Committee." Wealthy Ivy League and elite private college students will be the party's Red Guards in America's 2020 "Cultural Revolution."
At the Walter Duranty Times, "The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism":
Lately, Sam Jacobs has been having a lot of conversations with his family’s lawyers. He’s trying to gain access to more of his $30 million trust fund. At 25, he’s hit the age when many heirs can blow their money on harebrained businesses or a stable of sports cars. He doesn’t want to do that, but by wealth management standards, his plan is just as bad. He wants to give it all away. “I want to build a world where someone like me, a young person who controls tens of millions of dollars, is impossible,” he said. A socialist since college, Mr. Jacobs sees his family’s “extreme, plutocratic wealth” as both a moral and economic failure. He wants to put his inheritance toward ending capitalism, and by that he means using his money to undo systems that accumulate money for those at the top, and that have played a large role in widening economic and racial inequality. Millennials will be the recipients of the largest generational shift of assets in American history — the Great Wealth Transfer, as finance types call it. Tens of trillions of dollars are expected to pass between generations in just the next decade. And that money, like all wealth in the United States, is extremely concentrated in the upper brackets. Mr. Jacobs, whose grandfather was a founder of Qualcomm, expects to receive up to $100 million over the course of his lifetime. Most of his fellow millennials, however, are receiving a rotten inheritance — debt, dim job prospects and a figment of a social safety net. The youngest of them were 15 in 2011 when Occupy Wall Street drew a line between the have-a-lots and everyone else; the oldest, if they were lucky, were working in a post-recession economy even before the current recession. Class and inequality have been part of the political conversation for most of their adult lives. In their time, the ever-widening gulf between the rich and poor has pushed left-wing politics back into the American political mainstream. President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. trailed Senator Bernie Sanders, the socialist candidate, by 20 points among millennial voters in this year’s Democratic presidential primary. And over the last six years, millennials have taken the Democratic Socialists of America from a fringe organization with an average member age of 60 to a national force with chapters in every state and a membership of nearly 100,000, most of them under 35. Mr. Jacobs, as both a trust-fund kid and an anticapitalist, is in a rare position among leftists fighting against economic inequality. But he isn’t alone in trying to figure out, as he put it, “what it means to be with the 99 percent, when you’re the 1 percent.” Challenging the System “I was always taught that this is just the way the world is, that my family has wealth while others don’t, and that because of that, I need to give some of it away, but not necessarily question why it was there,” said Rachel Gelman, a 30-year-old in Oakland, Calif., who describes her politics as “anticapitalist, anti-imperialist and abolitionist.” Her family always gave generously to liberal causes and civil society groups. Ms. Gelman supports groups devoted to ending inequality, including the Movement for Black Lives, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and Critical Resistance, a leading prison abolition group. “My money is mostly stocks, which means it comes from underpaying and undervaluing working-class people, and that’s impossible to disconnect from the economic legacies of Indigenous genocide and slavery,” Ms. Gelman said. “Once I realized that, I couldn’t imagine doing anything with my wealth besides redistribute it to these communities.” According to the consulting firm Accenture, the Silent Generation and baby boomers will gift their heirs up to $30 trillion by 2030, and up to $75 trillion by 2060. These fortunes began to amass decades ago — in some cases centuries. But the concentration of wealth became stratospheric starting in the 1970s, when neoliberalism became the financial sector’s guiding economic philosophy and companies began to obsessively pursue higher returns for shareholders. “The wealth millennials are inheriting came from a mammoth redistribution away from the working masses, creating a super-rich tiny minority at the expense of a fleeting American dream that is now out of reach to most people,” said Richard D. Wolff, a Marxist and an emeritus economics professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst who has published 12 books about class and inequality. He said he has been professionally arguing against capitalism’s selling points since his teaching career began, in 1967, but that his millennial students “are more open to hearing that message than their parents ever were.” Heirs whose wealth has come from a specific source sometimes use that history to guide their giving. Pierce Delahunt, a 32-year-old “socialist, anarchist, Marxist, communist or all of the above,” has a trust fund that was financed by their former stepfather’s outlet mall empire. (Mx. Delahunt takes nongendered pronouns.) “When I think about outlet malls, I think about intersectional oppression,” Mx. Delahunt said. There’s the originally Indigenous land each mall was built on, plus the low wages paid to retail and food service workers, who are disproportionately people of color, and the carbon emissions of manufacturing and transporting the goods. With that on their mind, Mx. Delahunt gives away $10,000 a month, divided between 50 small organizations, most of which have an anticapitalist mission and in some way tackle the externalities of discount shopping. If money is power, then true wealth redistribution also means redistributing authority. Margi Dashevsky, who is 33 and lives in Alaska, gets guidance on her charitable giving from an advisory team of three women activists from Indigenous and Black power movements. “The happenstance of me being born into this wealth doesn’t mean I’m somehow omniscient about how it should be used,” she said. “It actually gives me a lot of blind spots.” She also donates to social justice funds like Third Wave Fund, where grant-making is guided by the communities receiving funding, instead of being decided by a board of wealthy individuals. The latter sort of nonprofit, Ms. Dashevsky said, “comes from a place of assuming incompetence, putting up all these hurdles for activists and wasting their time on things like impact reporting. I want to flip that on its head by stepping back, trusting and listening.” Of course, an individual act of wealth redistribution does not, on its own, change a system. But these heirs see themselves as part of a bigger shift, and are dedicated to funding its momentum.
I've been watching a lot of long podcasts, YouTube interviews, and Bloggingheads t.v.
So much great, great stuff out there. Except for football, and streaming shows late at night, I haven't been watching ANY mainstream news programming, and I watch pretty much everything. I'm just sick of it right now.
But Gleen Greenwald's an island of reason in a sea of mental illness.
Here's the interview, via Instapundit, "ONE OF THE FEW LEFTIES WHO’LL GIVE TRUMP CREDIT FOR HIS RECORD OF PEACE: Glenn Greenwald: Nothing Trump Did Compares to the ‘Moral Evil’ of Bush’s and Obama’s Wars."
"Draggin' the Linel"
Flopping Aces, "Communist Defectors Warn About Four Stages Of Subversion — And America Is On The Last One ..."..."
View From the Beach, "‘Hail To Thee, My Alma Mater ..."