'The People's Vote' March for a New Brexit Referendum

Leftists want a do-over. Just thinking about it makes me guffaw.

Britain had the "people's vote" on Brexit two years ago and leftists lost. They also lost their minds, and they've been wailing and waging a hissy fit war on democracy ever since. The final deal for the formal "leave" negotiations should have been completed long ago, so blame the inept Theresa May for that (bless her heart, the corrupt little totalitarian).

In any case, here's the Guardian U.K., "People's Vote march: '700,000' rally for new Brexit referendum," and "Huge crowd turns out in London to demand a 'people's vote' on Brexit."

And video, "Hundreds of thousands attend People's Vote march in London: Organisers say more than 600,000 people rallied in central London on Saturday to call for a referendum on the final Brexit deal."

And don't miss Pat Condell's blistering denunciation of the loser remain progs. Watch:

Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse

At Amazon, Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse: The Story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI's War on the American Indian Movement.

Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

*BUMPED.*

Keeping up with the "Cultural Marxism," make sure you pick up a copy of this one.

At Amazon, Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks.

'Migrant Caravan' Breaks Border Fence at Guatamala-Mexico Checkpoint (VIDEO)

Here's the video, via Associated Press, "Migrants force through fence at Mexican border: On Friday, the migrant caravan of at least 3,000 broke down gates at the Guatemalan border with Mexico and streamed toward a bridge to Mexico."

And here's Laura Ingraham with her opening "angle," at Fox News:

Glamorous Rhian Sugden

She's a selfie-lovin' babe, heh.

#BTS of the more glamorous side of my life ❤️📸 pic.twitter.com/RJxgKEIguy

— Rhian Sugden (@Rhianmarie) October 18, 2018

Kara Del Toro Bikini Shots

This is from earlier this year, but Ms. Kara is spectacular.

At Hollywood Tuna, "Kara Del Toro Belongs in a Bikini."

Kate Upton on Picking the Perfect Swimsuit (VIDEO)

At Sports Illustrated Swimsuit:

#DeleteFacebook

Well, I rarely use it, so deleting my account won't affect me much either way. I guess I'd lose a few connections to people that are valuable. Maybe I could message my important contacts, get their cellphone numbers, and then delete the monstrosity.

I hadn't really thought of it until now, and that sounds pretty good actually, heh.

In any case, Jacob Weisberg reviews two books that I've promoted here, Siva Vaidhyanathan's, Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy, and Jaron Lanier's, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.

At the New York Review, "The Autocracy App":

"By training its users to elevate feelings of agreement and belonging over truth, Facebook has created a gigantic 'forum for tribalism.'" https://t.co/Ll1dnaTTtw via @nybooks

— Sarah V. Schweig (@sarahvschweig) October 16, 2018

Facebook is a company that has lost control—not of its business, which has suffered remarkably little from its series of unfortunate events since the 2016 election, but of its consequences. Its old slogan, “Move fast and break things,” was changed a few years ago to the less memorable “Move fast with stable infra.” Around the world, however, Facebook continues to break many things indeed.

In Myanmar, hatred whipped up on Facebook Messenger has driven ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya. In India, false child abduction rumors on Facebook’s WhatsApp service have incited mobs to lynch innocent victims. In the Philippines, Turkey, and other receding democracies, gangs of “patriotic trolls” use Facebook to spread disinformation and terrorize opponents. And in the United States, the platform’s advertising tools remain conduits for subterranean propaganda.

Mark Zuckerberg now spends much of his time apologizing for data breaches, privacy violations, and the manipulation of Facebook users by Russian spies. This is not how it was supposed to be. A decade ago, Zuckerberg and the company’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, championed Facebook as an agent of free expression, protest, and positive political change. To drive progress, Zuckerberg always argued, societies would have to get over their hang-ups about privacy, which he described as a dated concept and no longer the social norm. “If people share more, the world will become more open and connected,” he wrote in a 2010 Washington Post Op-Ed. This view served Facebook’s business model, which is based on users passively delivering personal data. That data is used to target advertising to them based on their interests, habits, and so forth. To increase its revenue, more than 98 percent of which comes from advertising, Facebook needs more users to spend more time on its site and surrender more information about themselves.

The import of a business model driven by addiction and surveillance became clearer in March, when The Observer of London and The New York Times jointly revealed that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had obtained information about 50 million Facebook users in order to develop psychological profiles. That number has since risen to 87 million. Yet Zuckerberg and his company’s leadership seem incapable of imagining that their relentless pursuit of “openness and connection” has been socially destructive. With each apology, Zuckerberg’s blundering seems less like naiveté and more like malignant obliviousness. In an interview in July, he contended that sites denying the Holocaust didn’t contravene the company’s policies against hate speech because Holocaust denial might amount to good faith error. “There are things that different people get wrong,” he said. “I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong.” He had to apologize, again.

It’s not just external critics who see something fundamentally amiss at the company. People central to Facebook’s history have lately been expressing remorse over their contributions and warning others to keep their children away from it. Sean Parker, the company’s first president, acknowledged last year that Facebook was designed to cultivate addiction. He explained that the “like” button and other features had been created in response to the question, “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” Chamath Palihapitiya, a crucial figure in driving Facebook’s growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” over his involvement in developing “tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.” Roger McNamee, an early investor and mentor to Zuckerberg, has become a full-time crusader for restraining a platform that he calls “tailor-made for abuse by bad actors.”

Perhaps even more damning are the recent actions of Brian Acton and Jan Koum, the founders of WhatsApp. Facebook bought their five-year-old company for $22 billion in 2014, when it had only fifty-five employees. Acton resigned in September 2017. Koum, the only Facebook executive other than Zuckerberg and Sandberg to sit on the company’s board, quit at the end of April. By leaving before November 2018, the WhatsApp founders walked away from $1.3 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. When he announced his departure, Koum said that he was “taking some time off to do things I enjoy outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars and playing ultimate Frisbee.”

However badly he felt about neglecting his Porsches, Koum was thoroughly fed up with Facebook. He and Acton are strong advocates of user privacy. One of the goals of WhatsApp, they said, was “knowing as little about you as possible.” They also didn’t want advertising on WhatsApp, which was supported by a 99-cent annual fee when Facebook bought it. From the start, the pair found themselves in conflict with Zuckerberg and Sandberg over Facebook’s business model of mining user data to power targeted advertising. (In late September, the cofounders of Instagram also announced their departure from Facebook, reportedly over issues of autonomy.)

At the time of the acquisition of WhatsApp, Zuckerberg had assured Acton and Koum that he wouldn’t share its user data with other applications. Facebook told the European Commission, which approved the merger, that it had no way to match Facebook profiles with WhatsApp user IDs. Then, simply by matching phone numbers, it did just that. Pooling the data let Facebook recommend that WhatsApp users’ contacts become their Facebook friends. It also allowed it to monetize WhatsApp users by enabling advertisers to target them on Facebook. In 2017 the European Commission fined Facebook $122 million for its “misleading” statements about the takeover.

Acton has been less discreet than Koum about his feelings. Upon leaving Facebook, he donated $50 million to the Signal Foundation, which he now chairs. That organization supports Signal, a fully encrypted messaging app that competes with WhatsApp. Following the Cambridge Analytica revelations, he tweeted, “It is time. #deletefacebook.”

The growing consensus is that Facebook’s power needs checking. Fewer agree on what its greatest harms are—and still fewer on what to do about them. When Mark Zuckerberg was summoned by Congress in April, the toughest questioning came from House Republicans convinced that Facebook was censoring conservatives, in particular two African-American sisters in North Carolina who make pro-Trump videos under the name “Diamond and Silk.” Facebook’s policy team charged the two with promulgating content “unsafe to the community” and indicated that it would restrict it. Facebook subsequently said the complaint was sent in error but has never explained how that happened, or how it decides that some opinions are “unsafe.”

Democrats were naturally more incensed about the twin issues of Russian interference in the 2016 election and the abuse of Facebook data by Cambridge Analytica in its work for Trump’s presidential campaign.

Keep reading.

Democrats Have Shifted to the Extreme Left

Following-up from yesterday, "The Democrats' Left Turn."

At IBD, "It's Official: Democrats Are the Extremists Today":

It's Official: Democrats Are The Extremists Today https://t.co/dAzwBCGpju #tcot #tlot

— IBDeditorials (@IBDeditorials) October 12, 2017

Everyone knows that the country is more politically polarized than ever, but most don't know why. Data from the highly respected Pew Research Center provides a definitive answer. It's because Democrats have moved sharply to the extreme left.

The Pew report — titled "The Partisan Divide on Political Values Grows Even Wider" — is the latest in a decades-long series of surveys it has conducted to gauge people's views on various key issues, including the size of government, immigration, corporate profits, race relations. The authors of the report note the "divisions between Republicans and Democrats on fundamental political values ... reached record levels during Barack Obama's presidency. In Donald Trump's first year as president, these gaps have grown even larger."

Given the way politics gets reported these days, it's easy to conclude that the widening gap is the result of Republicans become more extreme in their views. That is, after all, a mantra among Democrats and the press. The GOP is the party of racist, sexist, xenophobic, right-wing extremists, we hear over and over again, while Democrats are but humble centrists.

The Pew data, however, make it clear that the shift toward the extreme has happened among Democrats, not Republicans.

This can be seen in dramatic fashion when you look at where the center of each party was in 1994, and where it is today. Pew used a 10-item scale of political values to determine ideological purity among those who claim affiliation with the two parties. The results show that while the Republican center moved only slightly to the right over the past 23 years, the center of Democratic part shifted far to the left. (See the nearby chart.)

Take a look at specific value questions Pew asks and you can see why.

Pew asks, for example, whether poor people have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return. In 1994, 63% of Republicans agreed with this sentiment, as did 44% of Democrats.

This year, 65% of Republicans agreed — a 2-point increase — while just 18% of Democrats did — a 26-point drop.

Nearly two-thirds (65%) of Democrats used to believe that most people who want to get ahead can do so if they work hard. Today, just 45% of Democrats believe this. Among Republicans, the change was negligible — it went from 73% in 1994 to 77% today.

How about the question of whether racial discrimination is the "main reason many black people can't get ahead these days"?

In 1994, just 39% of Democrats and 26% of Republicans felt this way. That was 14 years before the U.S. elected a black president.

Now, after eight years of Obama in the White House, 64% of Democrats say racism is the main reason blacks can't get ahead, while 14% of Republicans do.

Claudia Lion Photos

At Drunken Stepfather, "Claudia Lion Invisible of the Day."

Russia's GRU Military Intelligence Service is Putin's Personal Political Instrument

At Der Spiegel, "Doing Putin's Dirty Work: The Rise of Russia's GRU Military Intelligence Service":

Russia's GRU military intelligence service has become a political instrument for President Putin -- in the poison attack in Salisbury, hacking against the West and even in dealing with his country's doping scandal. Lately, though, the secret service can't seem to stay out of the headlines.

Each autumn, Russia's GRU secret service celebrates its birthday. Falling on Nov. 5, the festival is officially called the Day of the Military Intelligence Agent and commemorates the founding of the Soviet military intelligence service in 1918. At the GRU headquarters, a modern, functional building located in northwest Moscow, the defense minister gives an inspiring speech, followed by medals for deserving employees.

This year, though -- on the GRU's 100th birthday -- the mood is far from cheerful. Instead of a party atmosphere at headquarters, the Defense Ministry held a crisis meeting instead. And it was apparently open season on the GRU. "Complete incompetence" and "unbridled sloppiness" were a couple of the accusations leveled at the agency, one journalist learned, and a jokester apparently even asked why GRU agents abroad "don't just put on budenovkas?" Budenovka is the name of the striking pointed caps adorned with the Soviet star that members of the Red Army began wearing in 1918.

At the moment, Russia's military intelligence service is having trouble staying out of the headlines. That in itself is a sign of crisis, given that spies generally prefer to keep themselves out of the news. Until recently, only a handful of people abroad even knew what the abbreviation GRU stood for: Main Intelligence Directorate. For most people, Russian intelligence was synonymous with the domestic FSB intelligence agency once headed by Vladimir Putin.

Leaving Tracks Everywhere

That, though, has recently changed, with new details about the GRU emerging on a regular basis in recent weeks. Whether it's the poison attack on ex-double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, Britain, or a cyberattack in The Hague, the exposing of coup plans in the Balkans or the hacking of anti-doping agencies, of the U.S. presidential campaign, of the German federal parliament's computer network or of the Malaysian public prosecutor's office investigating the shooting down of an airplane over Ukraine, the GRU has been leaving its tracks everywhere. The series of blunders is surprising. But so too is the fact that this intelligence service has become so ubiquitous. Is it still even a military secret service or has it morphed into something bigger? And if so, how did GRU get there?

Andrei Soldatov also finds himself asking such questions recently. The Moscow-based journalist has spent years reporting on the world of the Russian secret services. Now, he no longer even understands it himself. He sounds a bit like a music critic who has been forced to listen to a jackhammer instead of a string quintet.

Until recently, the GRU had been regarded as professional, if not particularly squeamish. But the latest news -- such as the March 4 attack in which ex-agent Skripal was supposed to be killed in Salisbury using a neurotoxin -- has cast the agency in a different light. Two men suspected by the British in the incident claimed on Russian television that they had been nothing more than harmless tourists. The performance was ridiculously implausible, and it didn't take long for it to be refuted. The investigative journalism platform Bellingcat recently revealed that both are high-ranking GRU officers and recipients of Russia's highest government award, the "Hero of the Russian Confederation." The site identified the men traveling under the aliases Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov as Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin.

Another clumsy operation also ensued in The Hague only one month after Salisbury. Four GRU employees attracted the attention of Dutch intelligence agents when they tried to hack the computer network of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons from a parking lot. The four had entered the country with diplomatic passports and had been picked up at the airport by an embassy employee. Their computer still carried traces of an attack on an anti-doping conference. Soldatov describes the story as "a nightmare," adding that it is far more bizarre than the action in Salisbury. How, he asks himself, can a secret service act in such a dumb way? And what is going on in the heads of military officers who are sent to attack sports organizations rather than military targets?

To answer these questions, one has to look at the GRU's past. Since the dismantling of the Soviet Union's once all-purpose KGB, Russia has been home to a broad palette of intelligence agencies. The KGB's First Chief Directorate became the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation. The agency is regarded as chic and elegant, and it is located "in the forest," as its shielded headquarters are referred to in agent jargon. The KGB's Ninth Chief Directorate became the Federal Protective Service (FSO), which is responsible for providing protection to Putin and the Kremlin. The agency is feared primarily because proximity to Putin is synonymous with power in the country. The rest of the KGB became the Federal Security Service (FSB), the domestic intelligence agency. It's the best-known agency and it also took over KGB headquarters at Lubyanka Square. Unfortunately, it also adopted some of the Soviet secret polices' methods.

What makes the GRU so special is the fact that it is the only intelligence agency that has nothing to do with the former KGB and its legacy. It was and still is subordinate to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. It even possesses what amounts to its own army. The GRU's Spetsnaz brigades are elite troops trained for action in enemy territory. They also serve to attract new agents. Those who prove themselves in the GRU's Spetsnaz military service stand good chances of advancement within the apparatus.

This is why typical GRU agents differ from their civilian counterparts in the SWR foreign intelligence service. Broadly speaking, they typically aren't sharp analysts with good manners, but social climbers who lack finesse. Though they know how to bury an explosive device and feel more comfortable under enemy fire than in a provincial part of England. At first glance, the two Salisbury suspects, GRU officers Chepiga and Mishkin, seem to fit that mold. Both of them have traveled an impressive path from remote villages on Russia's fringe to the officers' clubs in the capital.

Diminished Influence

While KGB colleagues had to watch the monument to their idol Felix Dzerzhinsky, who founded the Soviet secret police, being dismantled on Lubyanka Square in 1991 and their authority later divided, the GRU didn't have to reform at all. The organization still doesn't even have its own press office. But the agency suffered all the more after Putin entered the Kremlin in 2000. Under Putin, the GRU lost influence relative to FSB, which became ever more powerful. And the radical Russian military reform beginning in 2008 struck the agency right at its core. Then-Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov initially stripped the GRU of the Spetsnaz brigades, the very thing that distinguished it from the other secret services. "The idea was to get rid of the Soviet legacy," says military expert Alexander Golts. "Serdyukov didn't foresee at that time that a new Cold War would break out."

It's perhaps no coincidence that GRU also had its power symbolically curbed at the time. The traditional abbreviation was shortened to GU -- from the "Main Intelligence Directorate" to the "Main Directorate" of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, even though the old designation has been retained in everyday usage. Meanwhile, the bat in the organization's original coat of arms, which some GRU veterans proudly wear as tatoos, was replaced by a carnation.

"They don't like Putin at the GRU," says Sergei Kanev, a prominent investigative journalist in Moscow. Kanev's reporting helped shed light on GRU activities in Salisbury. He helped expose supposed tourist Ruslan Boshirov as GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga and also discovered that officials at the Defense Ministry are furious at the GRU right now. "There were angry people at the weekend meeting," he says, adding that he learned about the atmosphere there from a reliable source. If Kanev's source can be believed, then President Putin already summoned GRU head Colonel General Igor Korobov to a meeting back in mid-September for a dressing down. Korobov is said to have collapsed at home afterward...

Still more.

Amber Lee's Offshore Winds and Warm Weather Forecast

Boy, it's freakin' hot out today, man. These are major Santa Ana conditions, and wonderful surfing weather.

If you're local, head down to the beach --- you can't beat this!

Here's the fabulous figured Ms. Amber, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

The Democrats' Left Turn

From Thomas Edsall, at NYT, "The Democrats' Left Turn Is Not an Illusion":

.@edsall: Over the past 18 years, the Democratic electorate has moved steadily to the left. Can the party win that way? Does it have a choice? https://t.co/anbe0Pqop0

— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) October 18, 2018

Over the past 18 years, the Democratic electorate has moved steadily to the left, as liberals have displaced moderates. Self-identified liberals of all races and ethnicities now command a majority in the party, raising the possibility that views once confined mainly to the party elite have spread into the rank and file.

From 2001 to 2018, the share of Democratic voters who describe themselves as liberal has grown from 30 to 50 percent, according to data provided by Lydia Saad, a senior editor at the Gallup Poll.

The percentage of Democrats who say they are moderate has fallen from 44 to 35; the percentage of self-identified conservative Democrats has gone from 25 to 13 percent.

Well-educated whites, especially white women, are pushing the party decisively leftward. According to Gallup, the share of white Democrats calling themselves liberal on social issues has grown since 2001 from 39 to 61 percent. Because of this growth, white liberals are now roughly 40 percent of all Democratic voters.

While a substantial percentage of Democratic minorities identify as liberals, those percentages have not been growing at anywhere near the rate that they have for white Democrats, so blacks and Hispanics have not contributed significantly to the rising percentage of self-identified Democratic liberals. Over the past 17 years, for example, the percentage of black Democrats who identify themselves as liberals grew by a modest three percentage points, according to both Gallup and the Pew Research Center.

In fact, white liberals are well to the left of the black electorate on some racial issues.

Take the issue of discrimination as a factor holding back African-American advancement. White liberals are to the left of black Democrats, placing a much stronger emphasis than African-Americans on the role of discrimination and much less emphasis on the importance of individual effort.

Among white liberals, according to Pew survey data collected in 2017, 79.2 percent agreed that “racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days.” 18.8 percent agreed that “blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition,” a 60.4 point difference, according to a detailed analysis of the Pew data provided the Times by Zach Goldberg, a doctoral candidate in political science at Georgia State University.

Among blacks, 59.9 percent identified discrimination as the main deterrent to upward mobility for African-Americans, and 32.0 percent said blacks were responsible for their condition — in other words, blacks are more conservative than white liberals on this issue.

The dominant role of well-educated, relatively upscale white Democrats in moving the party to the left reflects the declining role of the working class in shaping the party’s ideology...

Still more.

I hate the use of "liberal" to describe these ghouls. They're leftists. Radical leftists, in fact.

When I teach ideology in my American government classes, I indicate that today's Democrat Party is a leftist party with a hardcore radical fringe. Think tech sector progressives, Hollywood leftists, and coastal elites. These idiots are not only driving the leftward tilt, they're destroying the country. Vote these people out. Put them down, hard. You life may depend on it.

Demi Rose Stuns With Giant Plunging Bikini Cleavage

At Fleshbot, "Fresh Links."

The Republican #WalkAway Movement.

This is really well done.

From Troy Worden, at American Greatness:

My latest for @theamgreatness, criticizing the Republican #WalkAway Movement. I'm looking at you, @JRubinBlogger, @MaxBoot, @BillKristol, @TheRickWilson, @davidfrum. https://t.co/kIXkP6hXKf

— Troy Worden (@TroyWerden) October 17, 2018

'Wrong Way'

Sublime, from Tuesday morning's drive-time, at 93.1 Jack FM.

Times Like These
Foo Fighters
7:01am

Wanted Dead Or Alive
Bon Jovi
6:49am

Vacation
The Go-Go's
6:46am

Black Hole Sun
Soundgarden
6:43am

I Would Die 4 U
Prince
6:37am

You Make Lovin' Fun
Fleetwood Mac
6:33am

Tell Me Baby
Red Hot Chili Peppers
6:22am

Personal Jesus
Depeche Mode
6:19am

Bohemian Rhapsody
Queen
6:13am

People Are Strange
Various Artists
6:09am

Wrong Way
Sublime
6:07am

Who Is Karl Marx?

Here's Paul Kengor, for Prager University:



And flashback, "Bicentennial of Birth of Karl Marx, the Man Whose Ideas Killed Untold Millions."

'Laughter and enjoyment are out, emotional support are in, as Netflix's latest comedy special makes clear...'

From Scott Beauchamp, at AmCon, "Social Justice Warriors Aren't Funny":

What happens when you mix comedy with SJW progressivism? Whatever it is, it isn't comedy anymore: https://t.co/vWAJpahjO2

— The American Conservative (@amconmag) October 16, 2018

“Laughs are cheap. I’m going for gasps.” – Mac in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

There’s an older episode of The Green Room with Paul Provenza when the late Patrice O’Neal, arguably one of the best stand-up comics in recent history, gets serious for a moment, saying: “I love being able to say anything I want. I had to learn how to stop caring about people not laughing. Because the idea of comedy, really, is not everybody should be laughing. It should be about 50 people laughing and 50 people horrified. There should be people who get it and people who don’t get it.”

O’Neal gets right to the chaotic, trickster heart of comedy with that statement. Comedy at its best balances humor against shock–not necessarily vulgarity, mind you, but a sort of unsettling surprise. It’s a topsy-turvy glimpse at an uncanny, upside-down world, which, if the joke lands, provides a bulwark against torpor and complacency. Great comedy inhabits the absurdity of the world. It makes itself into a vantage point from which everything seems delightfully ridiculous, including (often especially) the comedians themselves. We wouldn’t need comedy in a world that wasn’t absurd. Perhaps that’s why Dante only included humor in his Inferno. There is no absurdity in paradise.

Unfortunately, Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, a comedy special recently released on Netflix, only embraces the non-laughter half of O’Neal’s dictum. It’s the very epitome of self-serious, brittle, didactic, SJW “comedy.” It’s not funny. And worse, it’s not meant to be. Gadsby, a queer Australian comedian, uses her “stand-up special” as a way to destroy the very medium she pretends to be professionally engaged in. Her basic argument is that, since comedy is by its very nature self-deprecating (true), people who define themselves as members of an oppressed minority shouldn’t engage in comedy because they’re only participating in the violence already being done to them by society at large.

As Soraya Roberts writes in The Baffler, “[Gadsby’s] performance is not comedy, in fact, but a rejection of comedy­–a medium she boils down to half-truths made up of tension (the set-up) and relief (the punchline), as opposed to the whole truth of storytelling’s beginning, middle and end.” It’s interesting to note here how Gadsby defines comedy down to a vapidly narrow set of very specific and au courant therapeutic concerns. “Laughter is not our medicine,” she actually says at one point in the show. It’s the same predictable posturing we’ve come to expect from mediocre talent riding the wave of SJW self-seriousness, a sort of emotivist mad libs. “Punchlines need trauma because punchlines need tension,” Gadsby harangues the audience. “I will not allow my story to be destroyed.”

The flaws of this sort of SJW anti-comedy are obvious. There’s no shock, no surprise, no wild current of absurd energy charging the room with tension. And so it’s a stretch to even call it comedy in the broadest sense. It’s more like a cross between a TED Talk and a gnostic sermon. But maybe more importantly, if Gadsby’s ideology is taken to its logical extreme, all comedy is verboten, because it would mean either that marginalized people are making fun of themselves (out) or that only non-marginalized people have “access” to “comedic spaces” (definitely out). And so the end game of this specious logic brought to the stage is the self-defeating conclusion that minorities simply don’t do comedy...

RTWT.

Rookie Georgia Gibbs (VIDEO)

At Sports Illustrated Swimsuit:

Heidi Heitkamp Looks to Be Crushed on the Shoals of Hard-Left Identity Politics

A great post from Robert Stacy McCain, at the Other McCain, "As ‘Blue Wave’ Collapses, Desperate Democrat Denounced by Women":

.@PatriarchTree "As ‘Blue Wave’ Collapses, Desperate Democrat Denounced by Women." #HeidiHeitkamp #Democrats #Election2018 🤷‍♂️ https://t.co/B14N0HlRlm pic.twitter.com/rLSZWBjqaF

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) October 17, 2018

Heitkamp looks set to lose a seat Democrat have held since 1960 and why? Because in the post-Obama era, Democrats have made identity politics the sole basis of their electoral appeal. Democrats are the anti-white party and the anti-male party. Common-sense people outside the coastal urban bubbles reject this ideology of hatred, and yet the more they register their opposition to the Democrat agenda, the more the Democrats double down. If you opposed the dishonest smear campaign against Justice Kavanaugh, you’re a “rape apologist,” guilty of defending “white male privilege.” The possibility that Christine Blasey Ford was lying (which is what the preponderance of evidence indicates) was automatically excluded from discussion, and anyone who argued on behalf of due-process rights was accused of “misogyny.” In essence, Democrats made the Kavanaugh hearings a referendum on radical feminist ideology, and were shocked they lost...

RTWT at the link.

Lily Allen Goes Out and About in Completely See-Through

She's a nice lady!

At Taxi Driver, "Lily Allen Goes Out and About in Completely See-Through Top."

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BONUS: Sven-Eric Liedman, A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx.

The NPC Meme is the Best!

This is the craziest thing ever, and boy did it make the Twitter administrative leftists mad!

At Zero Hedge, "4Chan Sparks Mass Triggering With NPC Meme; Twitter Responds With Ban Hammer":

Gawd this is hilarious. #NPCmeme 😂😝🤣 https://t.co/uJwBnTclTe

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) October 17, 2018

The "weaponized autists" at 4Chan have done it again, because they can; a new meme suggesting that liberals are soulless idiots who can't think for themselves has gone viral. The concept compares Democrats to "nonplayable characters," or NPCs - the recurring characters in video games with repetitive lines and limited knowledge. Lack of an "inner voice" is a dead giveaway that someone may be an NPC.

The NPC meme essentially meant to ridicule the post-election perpetual outrage culture in which liberals simply parrot the latest talking points from their favorite pundits, who do their thinking for them.

The 4chan version is a simple greyed out, expressionless face known as "NPC Wojak" - which has triggered the left so hard that Twitter conducted a mass-banning campaign for accounts promoting the meme, and the New York Times wrote an entire article trying to figure it out.

The Times writes of the Twitter bans:

Over the weekend, Twitter responded by suspending about 1,500 accounts associated with the NPC trolling campaign. The accounts violated Twitter’s rules against “intentionally misleading election-related content,” according to a person familiar with the company’s enforcement process. The person, who would speak only anonymously, was not authorized to discuss the decision. -NYT.

There is precisely zero evidence that the accounts were spreading "intentionally misleading election-related content," so we're just going to have to take Twitter's word for it.

Um, actually, I think leftists on Twitter just couldn't handle the lolz.

If you sincerely refer to living human beings as NPCs you are a fascist, an enemy of to your own species, and basically a complete shitbag person. Dehumanization is not some cool trend of thought by Caucasian as fuck grad students, it’s the capitalist erasure of ethics.

— ◉ (@brightabyss) September 14, 2018

Fascists adopt dog whistles so quickly that as soon as one becomes recognizable to the public (like SJW) they’ve moved on, it’s not coincidence, it’s plausible deniability. “NPC” is explicitly meant to dehumanize, they’ll take advantage of lack of recognition as long as they can

— Appropriating Mummy 🎃💀👻 (@DreddByDawn) September 15, 2018

The NPC meme hit Silicon Valley so hard that they’re planning on banning it. pic.twitter.com/KVN6IWSfK0

— Faceberg (@thefaceberg) September 26, 2018

John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, Identity Crisis

At Amazon, John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck, Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America.

Don't Expect Big Democrat Wave Come November

A great report, at CNBC, "Don't expect a big Democratic wave this fall, a new CNBC poll says":

Don't expect a big Democratic wave this fall, a new CNBC poll says https://t.co/xI8rmjmSp5

— CNBC International (@CNBCi) October 15, 2018

With economic optimism soaring in the country, will Democrats be able to sweep to power in either house of Congress or will buoyant sentiment help Republicans keep hold of their Congressional majorities?

The latest CNBC All-America Economic Survey offers mixed signals, but leans against a wave Democratic election like that those that swept Republicans to power in 2010 and 2014.

The poll of 800 Americans across the country, with a margin of error of 3.5 percent, found a six-point Democratic lead on the question of who voters will choose in the November congressional elections. The 42 percent to 36 percent margin is not far from what pollsters would expect given the greater percentage of Democratic registered voters.

"A six point differential is not something that's going to cause a big electoral wave," said Micah Roberts, the Republican pollster on the CNBC poll, a partner Public Opinion Strategies. "Economic confidence that people have among a lot of groups is providing a buffer" for Republicans.

Indeed, the poll found that 48 percent of the public is optimistic about the current economy and optimistic it will get better, the highest level in the poll's 11-year history and more than double the 20 percent registered in the December 2016 survey. The poll, conducted Oct. 4th through the 7th, shows 83 percent of Republicans are optimistic but also 22 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of Independent voters.

To be sure, control of Congress is often decided by the sum of local issues and candidates rather than national sentiment. And this time, several special factors could have a big effect: including more open GOP seats, greater Democratic enthusiasm and millions of dollars of outside money flowing into contested seats. And a lot can change in the remaining weeks before the vote.

Still, Jay Campbell, the Democratic pollster for the survey and a partner with Hart Research Associates, is skeptical of a wave for the Democrats, saying the six-point advantage is "not enough to suggest this is going to be a massive wave election a la 2010." Campbell did add that the survey found a large 17 percent of undecided voters who will be critical to the outcome.

Several other polls have found a double-digit lead for Democrats in the so-called generic ballot question, but the average for polls tallied by Real Clear Politics is just 7.3.

Working in the Republicans' favor is not only record-high optimism about the economy but also about the stock market and near-record high optimism about wage growth...

Still more.

Elizabeth Warren Releases DNA Test Showing 1/1024 Native American Ancestry

This has been the big story at Memeorandum all day.

See the Boston Globe (safe link), "Warren releases results of DNA test."

And at Twitchy, "MATH doesn’t add up! It gets WORSE for Elizabeth Warren and her DNA release (hint, she’s STILL Fauxcahontas)."

MATH doesn’t add up! It gets WORSE for Elizabeth Warren and her DNA release (hint, she’s STILL Fauxcahontas) https://t.co/IdMKPdokND

— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) October 15, 2018

And from William Jacobson, at Legal Insurrection, "Elizabeth Warren DNA test does NOT prove she’s Native American, contrary to the hype."

Elizabeth Warren DNA test does NOT prove she’s Native American, contrary to the hype https://t.co/pzcnb2zsZP pic.twitter.com/24lnwn4lQZ

— Legal Insurrection (@LegInsurrection) October 15, 2018

James Holland, The Allies Strike Back

This the follow-up to Holland's, The Rise of Germany, 1939-1941 (The War in the West).

At Amazon, James Holland, The Allies Strike Back, 1941-1943 (The War in the West, Vol. II).

What the Establishment Misses About Trump's Foreign Policy

From Professor Randall Schweller, at Foreign Affairs, "Three Cheers for Trump’s Foreign Policy":

No more Uncle Sugar, no more multilateralism, no more free riding: Three cheers for Trump's foreign policy. https://t.co/uteDMsvf9o

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) August 16, 2018

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election heralded nothing less than certain catastrophe. At least, that was and remains the firm belief of “the Blob”—what Ben Rhodes, a foreign policy adviser in the Obama administration, called those from both parties in the mainstream media and the foreign policy establishment who, driven by habitual ideas and no small amount of piety and false wisdom, worry about the decline of the U.S.-led order. “We are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight,” the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman forecast after Trump’s victory. Others prophesied that Trump would resign by the end of his first year (Tony Schwartz, the co-author of Trump: The Art of the Deal), that he would be holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in six months (the liberal commentator John Aravosis), or that the United States might be headed down the same path that Germany took from the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich. That last warning came from former U.S. President Barack Obama last December at the Economic Club of Chicago, where he invoked the specter of Nazi Germany. “We have to tend to this garden of democracy or else things could fall apart quickly,” he said. “Sixty million people died, so you’ve got to pay attention—and vote.”

So far, the world has not come to an end, far from it. A year into Trump’s first term, the Islamic State, or ISIS—a fascist organization, by the way—had been virtually defeated in Syria and eliminated from all its havens in Iraq, thanks to the Trump administration’s decision to equip the largely Kurdish militia fighting ISIS in Syria and give U.S. ground commanders greater latitude to direct operations. All the while, Trump has continued the Obama doctrine of avoiding large-scale conventional wars in the Middle East and has succeeded where his predecessor failed in enforcing a real red line against Bashar al-Assad’s use of nerve gas in Syria by launching targeted air strikes in response. In North Korea, Trump’s strategy of “maximum pressure” has cut the country’s international payments by half, forcing Kim Jong Un to realize that his only choice is to negotiate.

On the domestic front, the unemployment rate fell to 3.8 percent in May, a level not seen since the heady days of the dot-com boom—with unemployment at an all-time low among African Americans; at or near multidecade lows among Hispanics, teenagers, and those with less than a high school education; and at a 65-year low among women in the labor force. Meanwhile, on Trump’s watch, the stock market and consumer confidence have hit all-time highs, the number of mortgage applications for new homes has reached a seven-year high, and gas prices have fallen to a 12-year low. Finally, with Trump pledging to bring to an end the era in which “our politicians seem more interested in defending the borders of foreign countries than their own,” illegal immigration was reduced by 38 percent from November 2016 to November 2017, and in April 2017, the U.S. Border Patrol recorded 15,766 apprehensions at the southwestern border—the lowest in at least 17 years.

As his critics charge, Trump does reject many of the core tenets of the liberal international order, the sprawling and multifaceted system that the United States and its allies built and have supported for seven decades. Questioning the very fabric of international cooperation, he has assaulted the world trading system, reduced funding for the UN, denounced NATO, threatened to end multilateral trade agreements, called for Russia’s readmission to the G-7, and scoffed at attempts to address global challenges such as climate change. But despite what the crowd of globalists at Davos might say, these policies should be welcomed, not feared. Trump’s transactional approach to foreign relations marks a United States less interested in managing its long-term relationships than in making gains on short-term deals. Trump has sent the message that the United States will now look after its own interests, narrowly defined, not the interests of the so-called global community, even at the expense of long-standing allies.

This worldview is fundamentally realist in nature. On the campaign trail and in office, Trump has argued that the United States needs its allies to share responsibility for their own defense. He has also called for better trade deals to level a playing field tilted against American businesses and workers and to protect domestic manufacturing industries from currency manipulation. He is an economic nationalist at heart. He believes that political factors should determine economic relations, that globalization does not foster harmony among states, and that economic interdependence increases national vulnerability. He has also argued that the state should intervene when the interests of domestic actors diverge from its own—for example, when he called for a boycott against Apple until the company helped the FBI break into the iPhone of one of the terrorists who carried out the 2015 attack in San Bernardino, California.

This realist worldview is not only legitimate but also resonates with American voters, who rightly recognize that the United States is no longer inhabiting the unipolar world it did since the end of the Cold War; instead, it is living in a more multipolar one, with greater competition. Trump is merely shedding shibboleths and seeing international politics for what it is and has always been: a highly competitive realm populated by self-interested states concerned with their own security and economic welfare. Trump’s “America first” agenda is radical only in the sense that it seeks to promote the interests of the United States above all...

Still more.

Wet Fashion Edita Vilkevičiūtė

At Drunken Stepfather, "Edita Vilkevičiūtė Wet Tits Out for Fashion of the Day."

Today's Deals

At Amazon, Shop Today: New deals. Every day. Shop our Deal of the Day, Lightning Deals and more daily deals and limited-time sales.

Also, Power Strip with 3 USB 3 Outlet, Desktop Charging Station with 5 Feet Extension Cord - Black.

Plus, AmazonBasics AA Performance Alkaline Batteries (100-Pack).

More, AmazonBasics USB Type-C to USB-A 2.0 Male Cable - 3 Feet (0.9 Meters) - White.

And, Military Outdoor Clothing Never Issued U.S. Military Canteen.

Still more, Handmade Damascus Steel 15.25 Inches Bowie Knife - Solid Marindi Wood/Bone Handle (Case/Knife may vary slightly).

Plus, Nestlé Pure Life Bottled Purified Water, 16.9 oz. Bottles, 24/Case.

And here, Koffee Kult Medium Roast Ground Coffee, 32oz.

BONUS: Matthew Kneale, Rome: A History in Seven Sackings.

Jennifer Delacruz's Red Flag Warning Forecast

The weather's changing rapidly from wet and rainy on Friday to gusty and windy tonight into tomorrow. October is normally going to get those Santa Ana conditions, so I guess this is a return to normal.

In any case, here's the lovely Ms. Jennifer, for ABC News 10 San Diego:

Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.

How #Democrats Created Insane 'Social Justice' Mobs

From the inimitable Robert Stacy McCain, at the Other McCain, "The TrigglyPuff Party: How Democrats Created Insane ‘Social Justice’ Mobs":

"Democrats are now held hostage by the mob mentality of the identity-politics 'social justice' coalition they’ve built. ... Democrats are now the party of TrigglyPuff, of angry college girls driven to fits of insanity ..." https://t.co/1Pjz9mHXgZ pic.twitter.com/I8oo0GxvZK

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) October 14, 2018

Commenting on the irrational female rage unleashed by the Kavanaugh confirmation circus, Stephen Green remarks: “The Democrats have worked hard to lock down the Trigglypuff vote, but at what cost of even slightly more moderate voters?” But do such voters really exist?

We are more than 25 years into a cycle of increasing polarization that arguably began with Bill Clinton’s election as president. Clinton’s radicalism — remember the so-called “assault weapons” ban? — sparked a backlash that cost Democrats the control of the House that they’d held for 40 years. Everything thereafter increased the partisan divide: The budget standoff that led to the government shutdown, the Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment crisis, the Florida recount in 2000, the Iraq War, the recapture of Congress by Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats, Obama’s election in 2008, the Tea Party movement, on and on.

It is not the case that America’s politics have become more divisive because the Republican Party has moved further right. Liberal pundits, commenting from within their ideological cocoons, habitually apply labels — “far right,” “extremist,” “white nationalist,” etc. — to depict the GOP as beholden to a dangerous fringe, but this is just paranoid propaganda. The typical Republican voter in 2018 is actually no more “extreme” than his father was in 1988. Nor is the policy agenda of the GOP now any more “far right” than it was in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The cause of the increased partisan divide is not that the Republicans have moved right, but that Democrats have moved left.

What happened, when did it happen and why did it happen?

What happened?

A whole helluva lot, lol, but keep reading.

Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

I gave my oldest son this book last Christmas, and now it's coming out in a feature film, due in theaters November 19th.

At Amazon, Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give. (The "movie tie-in" edition is here.)

And Judy Woodruff has this, at the PBS News Hour:

Ann Coulter on 'Watters' World' (VIDEO)

Coulter's new book is here, Resistance Is Futile!: How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind.

And at Fox News:

Why China's Rise Won't Happen

From Gordon Chang, at the National Interest, "China's Rise (and America's Fall) Just Won't Happen. Here's Why":

China's Rise (and America's Fall) Just Won't Happen. Here's Why https://t.co/qoBzTM9dh6

— National Interest (@TheNatlInterest) October 13, 2018

"This geopolitical recession is something really simple—it’s the end of the U.S.-led global order," Ian Bremmer, head of risk advisors Eurasia Group, told the ANZ Finance & Treasury Forum in Singapore this week.

Bremmer’s message plays well, and not just to those attending financial conferences. Most American policymakers, for instance, have bought into his “declinist” predictions about China’s rise and America’s fall. At least two—and maybe all three—of President Donald Trump’s immediate predecessors accepted the premise of eventual Chinese dominance.

For a long time, those predictions were generally accepted. Most recently, however, there are even more reasons to challenge the assumptions underpinning the narrative of declinism.

Declinists make one fundamentally incorrect assessment. “So that is one big reason why we have entered a geopolitical recession,” Bremmer told the crowd in Singapore. “All of the major international underpinnings of the U.S.-led order have become unmoored over the last 25 years.”

The most important reason for the establishment of the U.S.-led order after the Second World War was the dominance of the American economy, and the most important justification for declinist views has been China’s stunning four-decade economic revitalization. There is no shortage of predictions when in dollar-denominated terms China’s gross domestic product will overtake that of the U.S.

The gap between the two economies is still wide, however. Last year, the U.S. produced $19.39 trillion of GDP. China’s 2017 GDP, at a reported $12.84 trillion, was only 66.2 percent of America’s.

And that gap is, in reality, widening. Beijing’s official National Bureau of Statistics reported 6.8 percent growth for the first half of the year, far in excess of the American rate.

Yet China’s number is surely exaggerated. Beijing claimed nearly identical 6.7 percent growth for 2016. The World Bank, however, has cast doubt on that figure by releasing a chart in the middle of last year.

So what was China’s gross domestic product increase in 2016 according to the World Bank? Answer: 1.1 percent.

Shocked? The 1.1 percent figure is surprisingly close to the single best overall indicator of Chinese economic activity, total primary energy consumption. In 2016, total primary energy consumption, according to Beijing’s official numbers, was up 1.4 percent.

America’s economy, thanks to Trump’s deep cuts in taxes and regulations, is powering ahead. In the first two calendar quarters of this year, the economy grew 2.2 percent and 4.2 percent. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow forecast for the just-completed third quarter is 4.2 percent.

China’s economy is beset by excessive debt accumulation and other maladies, but the main factor inhibiting economic potential is not a systemic debt crisis—a concern to be sure—but the abandonment of reformist policies. Xi Jinping, the Chinese ruler, has turned his back on Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening up” program that is credited with sparking Chinese growth for almost four decades. Instead, Xi for a half decade has been reinstituting the Stalinist state model that Mao Zedong embraced in the early 1950s.

Xi’s reversal of liberal economic policies has been matched by his reversal of political and social policies. He has de-institutionalized the Communist Party, thereby heightening the risk of political instability. At the same time, he has demanded conformity—“absolute loyalty”—and tightened social controls. The institution of a nationwide social credit system , which will assign a score to every resident for all his or her actions, is but one example of the state’s attempt at total control of society.

China, as a result, is moving from authoritarianism back to totalitarianism, readopting a model that brought the People’s Republic to the brink of economic failure twice, once during the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s and early 1960s and again during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s to mid-1970s. China’s economy cannot be expected to do well in an increasingly intolerant political atmosphere, as the country’s own history suggests.

And there is one more reason to doubt Chinese economic dominance: demography. China will soon join the ranks of shrinking nations. The population will peak somewhere around 1.44 billion people at the end of next decade according to the U.N.’s World Population Prospects: The 2017 Revision. By the end of the century, China will have a population of 1.02 billion.

China’s decline has implications for its competition with the U.S. In 2015, China’s population was 4.4 times larger than America’s. By 2100, China is projected to have a population only 2.3 times larger.

China’s projected decline—and we should remember the U.N.’s estimates seem to overstate that country’s demographic potential—does not mean the Chinese economy cannot succeed, but it does mean it will have to succeed in spite of demography. China’s four-decade burst of growth occurred during the reaping of the “demographic dividend,” an extraordinary increase in the size of its workforce...

Still more.

Amber Lee's Sunday Forecast

More rain this weekend?

Well, here's the lovely Ms. Amber with the forecast, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future

Following-up, "America's New Mainline Ideology."

I do read a lot of the current Marxist revolutionary literature, but I've fallen a bit behind. (It takes a lot of time, and I've been enjoying a lot of classic fiction literature this past year.)

In any case, perhaps it's time to order some more books.

See Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work.

Democrats Becoming 'More Ruthless'

Folks are noticing, dang!

Here's the recent piece at Politico that got some pushback on Twitter the other day, plus more from the Republican National Committee Below:

After failing to stop Kavanaugh's confirmation, Democrats wonder if it's time to be more ruthless https://t.co/NyserWzlvR

— POLITICO (@politico) October 7, 2018

The Left: An Unhinged Mob. pic.twitter.com/d4YhXrAsXe

— GOP (@GOP) October 11, 2018

.@GOPChairwoman: We at the RNC certainly do not want to see people create problems around Democrat leaders or attack people in restaurants. We need a return to civility. pic.twitter.com/Ffg41tLcEf

— GOP (@GOP) October 12, 2018

Evelyn Taft's Weekend Forecast

Lots of rain last night, and tremendous thunder and lightning.

Here's Ms. Evelyn with the forecast, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Lots of thunder and lightning in #Irvine. Lots! ☔️

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) October 13, 2018

Killer lighting and thunder in #Irvine, Evelyn. One boom was so loud it sounded like a rocket blast over my house. Scary. ☔️👀🙏

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) October 13, 2018

America's New Mainline Ideology

This is perhaps the best explanation of "cultural Marxism' I've read. (ADDED: With the exception of Linda Kimball, "Cultural Marxism," at American Thinker back in 2007; a great piece.)

Very good.

At the Mises Institute, "Is Cultural Marxism America's New Mainline Ideology?":

Is Cultural Marxism America's New Mainline Ideology? | Antony P. Mueller https://t.co/SO4stcEbeq @realjameswoods

— Janie Johnson (@jjauthor) October 13, 2018

Another name for the neo-Marxism of increasing popularity in the United States  is cultural Marxism.” This theory says that the driving force behind the socialist revolution is not the proletariat — but the intellectuals. While Marxism has largely disappeared from the workers' movement, Marxist theory flourishes today in cultural institutions, in the academic world, and in the mass media. This “cultural Marxism” goes back to Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and the Frankfurt School. The theorists of Marxism recognized that the proletariat would not play the expected historical role as a “revolutionary subject.” Therefore, for the revolution to happen, the movement must depend on the cultural leaders to destroy the existing, mainly Christian, culture and morality and then drive the disoriented masses to Communism as their new creed. The goal of this movement is to establish a world government in which the Marxist intellectuals have the final say. In this sense, the cultural Marxists are the continuation of what started with the Russian revolution.

Lenin and the Soviets
Led by Lenin, the perpetrators of the revolution regarded their victory in Russia only as the first step to the world revolution. The Russian Revolution was neither Russian nor proletarian. In 1917, the industrial workers in Russia represented only a small part of the workforce, which mainly consisted of peasantry. The Russian Revolution was not the result of a labor movement but of a group of professional revolutionaries . A closer look at the composition of the Bolshevist party and of the first governments of the Soviet state and its repressive apparatus reveals the true character of the Soviet revolution as a project that did not aim at freeing the Russian people from the Tsarist yoke but was to serve as the launchpad for the world revolution.

The experience of World War I and its aftermath showed that the Marxist concept of the "proletariat" as a revolutionary force was an illusion. At the example of the Soviet Union, one could also see that socialism could not function without a dictatorship. These considerations brought the leading Marxist thinkers to the conclusion that a different strategy would be required to establish socialism. Communist authors spread the insight that the socialist dictatorship must come in disguise. Before socialism can succeed, the existing culture must change. Control of the culture must precede political control.

Cultural Control Rises in Tandem with Political Control
Helping the neo-Marxists was the fact many of their efforts in taking control of culture happened parallel to the encroachment of the state on individual liberties. Over the past decades, at the same time when so-called political correctness has been on the rise, the American government obtained a vast arsenal of repressive instruments. Few Americans seem to know that the U.S. is still under emergency law that has been in force since George W. Bush used the executive privilege to declare a state of national emergency in 2001. In the same year, 9/11 opened also the path to push through the Patriot Act . From a score of around 95 points, the Freedom House "Aggregate Index of Freedom" of the United States has fallen to 86 points in 2018.

Moral Corruption
The way toward the rule of the cultural Marxists is the moral corruption of the people. To accomplish this, the mass media and public education must not enlighten but confuse and mislead. The media and the educational establishment work to put one part of the society against the other part. While group identities get more specific, the catalog of victimization and history of oppression becomes more detailed. To turn into a recognized victim of suppression is the way to gain social status and to obtain the right to special assistance, of respect and social inclusion.

The demand for social justice creates an endless stream of expenditures deemed essential — for health, education, old age, and for all those people who are "needy," "persecuted" and "oppressed," be it real or imaginary. The flood of never-ending spending in these areas corrupts the state finances and produces fiscal crises. This helps the Neo-Marxists accuse "capitalism" of all evils when, in fact, it is the regulatory state that provokes the systemic failures and when it is the excess of public debt that causes the financial fragility.

Politics, the media, and the judiciary never pause at waging the new endless wars: the war on drugs or against high blood pressure or the campaigns that assert the endless struggle against fat and obesity. The list of the enemies grows every day whether racism, xenophobia, and anti-Islamism. The epitome of this movement is political correctness, the war against having one's own opinion. While the public tolerates disgusting expositions of behavior, particularly under the cult of the arts, the list of prohibited words and opinions grows daily. Public opinion must not go beyond the few accepted positions. Yet while the public debate impoverishes, the diversity of radical opinion flourishes in the hidden.

The cultural Marxists drive society morally into an identity crisis by the means of the false standards of a hypocritical ethics. The aim is no longer the "dictatorship of the proletariat," because this project has failed, but the "dictatorship of political correctness" whose supreme authority lies in the hands of the cultural Marxists. As a new class of priests, the guardians of the new orthodoxy rule the institutions whose power they try to extend over all parts of the society. The moral destruction of the individual is a necessary step to accomplish the final victory.

Opium of the Intellectuals
The believers of neo-Marxism are mainly intellectuals. Workers, after all, are a part of the economic reality of the production process and know that the socialist promises are rubbish. Nowhere was socialism established as the result of a labor movement. The workers have never been the perpetrators of socialism but always its victim. The leaders of the revolution have been intellectual party politicians and military men. It was up to the writers and artists to conceal the brutality of the socialist regimes through articles and books and by films, music, and paintings, and to give socialism a scientific-intellectual, aesthetic and moral appearance. In the socialist propaganda, the new system appears to be both fair and productive.

The cultural Marxists believe that someday they will be the sole holders of power and be able to dictate to the masses how to live and what to think. Yet the neo-Marxist intellectuals are in for a surprise...

Still more.

Gordon Chang, The Coming Collapse of China

At Amazon, Gordon Chang, The Coming Collapse of China.

Gay People Are 'F–king Terrified' to Criticize #TransCult Ideology

Arielle Scarcella's a cool chick, and actually kinda hot, even though she's lesbian.

She's something of a career sexologist, or at least she's monetized her "hobby" of sexual identity and identity politics. Robert Stacy McCain calls folks like this "occupation activists" --- that is, the make a job out of their politicized sexual identity.

Anyway, the Other McCain has a post up on Ms. Scarcella. See, "Arielle Scarcella: Gay People Are ‘F–king Terrified’ to Criticize Trans Ideology":

.@PatriarchTree "Arielle Scarcella: Gay People Are ‘F–king Terrified’ to Criticize #Trans Ideology." 😨 https://t.co/cQBxuMn6hO #TransCult pic.twitter.com/Js2gM7efDK

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) October 13, 2018

Arielle Scarcella has 550,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel, which makes her one of the most popular lesbian YouTubers. Some of her videos have more viewers than the average program at CNN (but let’s be honest, CNN is barely more popular than the Hallmark Channel). Her popularity is the only reason Ms. Scarcella has been able to survive telling the truth about transgender activists, who have harassed her viciously for months because of her criticism of their bizarre ideology.

In a video this week, Ms. Scarcella explained that most gay and lesbian YouTubers are “f–king terrified to even touch on an trans topics — about the blatant misogyny that the SJW trans activists promote, about how the Left is so far left at this point that they are suggesting conversion therapy and hiding it behind the agenda of ‘queer’ progressiveness, about how some bisexual YouTubers have made videos and public statements saying that our ‘genital preference’ is a whole bias, when in reality it’s not a bias, it’s not a preference, it’s our sexual orientation and it’s not something we can help, about how little gay men are actually policed for their sexual orientation in comparison to lesbians — not very much at all.”

Fear of being labelled a “TERF” (trans-exclusive radical feminist) causes many lesbian YouTubers to avoid the topic of transgenderism entirely, Ms. Scarcella explains, because SJWs (social justice warriors) like Riley Dennis have specifically targeted the lesbian community as “bigots” for rejecting relationships with men who think they’re women...

Keep reading.

Looks Like Democrat Heidi Heitkamp Is on the Way Out (VIDEO)

If Heitkamp loses, there's really no path for the Democrats to retake the Senate.

Republicans are absolutely gleeful about race. Heitkamp voted against Brett Kavanaugh, which to me doesn't make sense, other than what some say was the senator's pledege of allegiance to leftists who'll secure her a fat think tank job when she's out of office, or a university administration position, or some such far-left progressive sinecure to fatten the woman's coffers.

In any case, at Politico, "GOP closes in on Heitkamp knockout — and control of the Senate":

The North Dakota Democrat is down in polls. And if she loses, Democrats can all but kiss their hopes of winning the Senate goodbye.

Republicans say they’re on the cusp of delivering a knockout blow to North Dakota Democratic Sen. Heidi Heitkamp — and virtually ending Democrats’ hopes of winning the Senate.

Heitkamp is down in public polls by a significant margin, and most political handicappers think Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) is the favorite to beat her. If she goes down, Democrats would basically have to run the table in every other battleground race to take the chamber.

Republicans have had Heitkamp losing by double digits in their private polling for weeks, according to a GOP strategist working on Senate races. Democrats argue the race is closer but acknowledge she is down even in their polling, after her vote against Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.

“At this point, it’s really ours to lose,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.). “The race, probably to her detriment, has been nationalized around the Supreme Court and Trump.”

In an interview on Wednesday, Heitkamp acknowledged she’s facing an uphill battle but hinted that she believes Cramer could still self-immolate, pointing to his comments on sexual harassment and a new trade deal with Canada. In a story published last weekend, Cramer told The New York Times that sexual assault accusations and the #MeToo campaign against Kavanaugh were a “movement toward victimization” of men. He also was scolded by Canadians over his comments about new NAFTA negotiations.

“There’s a level of arrogance and rash statements that doesn’t reflect the typical North Dakota, common-sense contemplative, work-together kind of attitude,” Heitkamp said. “You can say all these crazy things, but sometimes the crazy things you say and how you behave has real consequences here.”

And her allies assert that Heitkamp is far from done. They point to her universal name ID, retail campaign skills and her surprise win in 2012 despite being down in the polls. In a state of just 750,000 people, and where perhaps 150,000 votes could win the race, winning over even 15,000 voters in the next month could make the difference, they argue.

“This is certainly the state that seems to be the most vulnerable. But that was probably the case a year ago,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). But he added, “It’s a tiny state, where you can make a lot of progress” meeting voters in person.

Democrats say their private polling shows Heitkamp's numbers recovering after dropping by double digits during the Kavanaugh fight, according to two Democrats familiar with the race. Heitkamp came out against Kavanaugh shortly before he was confirmed.

She's also seen a gush of online money into her campaign coffers since she came out against Kavanaugh, Democrats say. But she needs to mount a dramatic comeback in order for Democrats to have any shot at taking the Senate. It’s a long shot in any case, but nearly impossible if she loses.

Democrats need to net two seats to win majority, even as a half-dozen of their incumbents are in tough races. The party has four opportunities to flip Republican-held seats. But if Heitkamp loses they'd need to win three of those four, plus hold nine seats in states carried by Trump in 2016...

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