Sunday, November 22, 2020

Hundreds of New York City's Bodies Still Stored in Pandemic Freezer in Brooklyn

This is just gross. 

Horrific too. But just gross, disrespectful to the dead and their families, and a damning indictment of New York's "award-winning" leadership in this catastrophe. 

At WSJ, "NYC Dead Stay in Freezer Trucks Set Up During Spring Covid-19 Surge":

The bodies of hundreds of people who died in New York City during the Covid-19 surge in the spring are still in storage in freezer trucks on the Brooklyn waterfront. 
Many of the bodies are of people whose families can’t be located or can’t afford a proper burial, according to the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner. About 650 bodies are being stored in the trucks at a disaster morgue that was set up in April on the 39th Street Pier in Sunset Park. 
Before the pandemic, most if not all of the deceased would have been buried within a few weeks in a gravesite for the indigent on Hart Island, which is located in the Long Island Sound near the Bronx. 
But Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged in April that mass burials wouldn’t take place following reports that New York City was considering the use of temporary graves on Hart Island. 
Officials at the chief medical examiner’s office said they are having trouble tracking down relatives of about 230 deceased people. In cases like these, a spokeswoman said, it isn’t uncommon for the deceased to have been estranged from families and for next-of-kin details to be dated or incorrect. When next of kin have been contacted, officials said most bodies haven’t been collected because of financial reasons 
New York City increased its burial assistance to $1,700 from $900 in May. That is still short of the average $9,000 cost of a traditional service with burial in New York, according to the New York State Funeral Directors Association. A typical cremation with service costs about $6,500, according to the group. 
Every family has a right to request a free burial on Hart Island. Some families are confused about what to do, according to Dina Maniotis, the chief medical examiner’s office’s executive deputy commissioner, who oversaw the unit’s pandemic response. 
“This has been traumatic,” Ms. Maniotis said. ”We are working with them as gently as we can and coaxing them along to make their plans. Many of them will decide they want to go to Hart Island, which is fine.” 
The chief medical examiner’s office wasn’t built to deal with a global pandemic that killed tens of thousands of New Yorkers in a matter of months. Its forensic-investigations department has 15 staff members tasked with identification of bodies. A further seven people are responsible for contacting next of kin. 
The unit is set up to handle about 20 deaths a day, said Aden Naka, the office’s deputy director of forensic investigations. During the peak of the pandemic it was inundated with as many as 200 new cases daily. Scientists from the laboratories of the chief medical examiner’s office were drafted to reinforce the investigations team and speed up the identification process, Ms. Naka said. 
Family members deluged the office with calls seeking information about relatives who might have died as well as advice on requesting a death certificate, viewing a loved one’s body and making funeral arrangements. Officials of the chief medical examiner’s office said the city’s health department redirected more than 100 staff from other fields to manage the volume of calls, which soared to 1,000 a day from the usual 30 or 40. 
Ms. Naka said many of the callers were struggling with problems of their own. Some were recovering from the virus themselves or had lost their jobs because of the pandemic. Others were dealing with the second or third family member to die of Covid-19...

Still more.


Jennifer Delacruz's Sunday Forecast

She's still at home, or she's back at home, amid the new state lockdown. When will this tyranny ever end, sheesh?

At ABC News 10 San Diego:



Saturday, November 21, 2020

Magnificent Sarah Hoyt

See, "We, Magnificent Bastards":
But even if you want to believe lockdowns would work, the way they’re implemented tells you that we’re under psychological warfare that might be on the excuse of a virus, but have nothing really to do with it. No sane human being can say that more than 10 people in a CATHEDRAL designed for 2000 is a danger, but while you at the same time keep dispensaries open for pot? Yeah, no. In the same way, no sane human being can think wearing a mask at the zoo or botanic gardens, outside and in a sparsely “peopled” environment is going to make any difference, even if masks made a difference. (And before you say they make a marginal difference, no. Not really. The difference was “in the margin of error”, and that was before you take in account the masks involved had SEVENTEEN layers of fabric, relying on the “complicated pathway” to stop the virus. And no, I don’t have a link to that study, but trust me on this, it was one of the deep dives. Frankly, with four layers I can’t BREATHE, much less seventeen.)

RTWT.

 

Priti Patel is Sorry (VIDEO)

The bitch is sorry. (*Eye-roll.*) 

At the Guardian U.K., "How Boris Johnson found grounds to ignore Priti Patel bullying verdict: Sir Alex Allan was clear in his central finding against home secretary but offered caveats":

Boris Johnson’s decision to ignore the verdict of his independent adviser on ministerial standards, Sir Alex Allan, on a bullying inquiry into the home secretary has been met with indignation.

Allan, a public servant with a 47-year career in the civil service, was clear in his central finding that Priti Patel’s behaviour was in breach of the ministerial code, and he has resigned in the face of Johnson’s contrary ruling.

But did Allan’s statement on his findings leave the prime minister with some room for manoeuvre? Here we look at some of the key passages:

‘Justifiably frustrated’

The home secretary says that she puts great store by professional, open relationships. She is action-orientated and can be direct. The home secretary has also become – justifiably in many instances – frustrated by the Home Office leadership’s lack of responsiveness and the lack of support she felt in DfID [the Department for International Development] three years ago.

Analysis Allan says civil servants – particularly senior civil servants – should be able to handle robust criticism, though they should not “face behaviour that goes beyond that”. In his advice, Allan suggests that on more than one occasion Patel was justified in being frustrated at the operation of the Home Office. The background to the inquiry is a rift between Patel and the former top civil servant at the Home Office, Sir Philip Rutnam, who quit and launched tribunal proceedings against the minister. Allan acknowledges there were issues with the Home Office leadership – an allusion to Rutnam – and the lack of support.

Mind-Bogging Artificial Intelligence

It's Kashmir Hill, a technology reporter at the New York Times, who used to be a tech blogger back in the day. Once she commented on a blog post of mine thanking me for a link. I'm still blogging. She's at the Old Gray Lady. And I know. I know. It's a despicable left-wing partisan propaganda outlet, but even a broken clock is right twice a day. 

In any case, this is cool.


The creation of these types of fake images only became possible in recent years thanks to a new type of artificial intelligence called a generative adversarial network. In essence, you feed a computer program a bunch of photos of real people. It studies them and tries to come up with its own photos of people, while another part of the system tries to detect which of those photos are fake.

The back-and-forth makes the end product ever more indistinguishable from the real thing. The portraits in this story were created by The Times using GAN software that was made publicly available by the computer graphics company Nvidia.

Given the pace of improvement, it’s easy to imagine a not-so-distant future in which we are confronted with not just single portraits of fake people but whole collections of them — at a party with fake friends, hanging out with their fake dogs, holding their fake babies. It will become increasingly difficult to tell who is real online and who is a figment of a computer’s imagination.

“When the tech first appeared in 2014, it was bad — it looked like the Sims,” said Camille François, a disinformation researcher whose job is to analyze manipulation of social networks. “It’s a reminder of how quickly the technology can evolve. Detection will only get harder over time.”

Advances in facial fakery have been made possible in part because technology has become so much better at identifying key facial features. You can use your face to unlock your smartphone, or tell your photo software to sort through your thousands of pictures and show you only those of your child. Facial recognition programs are used by law enforcement to identify and arrest criminal suspects (and also by some activists to reveal the identities of police officers who cover their name tags in an attempt to remain anonymous). A company called Clearview AI scraped the web of billions of public photos — casually shared online by everyday users — to create an app capable of recognizing a stranger from just one photo. The technology promises superpowers: the ability to organize and process the world in a way that wasn’t possible before...

Keep reading.

 

'I love podcasts too...'

A classic:


Risque Kate Mara 'Doggy Style' Scene From the New Hulu Series, 'A Teacher' (VIDEO)

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Reportedly Insisted That Netflix End 'The Crown' Before It Gets to Their Drama

Well, those spoiled little f*cking brats. 

Piers Morgan's show at the video. 

And at Marie Claire:


--- When they signed their massive deal with Netflix, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle shocked a lot of royal fans who were surprised they would work with the streaming giant, which produces the royal drama The Crown.

--- According to royal biographer Angela Levin, Harry confided in her two years ago that the royal family did indeed watch the series, but that he was determined to make sure it stopped before it got to his adult life and relationship with Meghan Markle.

--- Although Harry and Meghan reportedly used their position as partners with Netflix to insist that The Crown end before it got to their royal drama, Levin fears the strategy might backfire and that Netflix might actually end up "getting a lot of information that will absolutely decry the royal family" from the Sussexes.

More.

 

Busty Nude Women in Fishnet

At Drunken Stepfather. This is amazing! 

Fishnet pussy shots too, dang! 

Big-Breasted Country Girl

You gotta follow Country Girls.



Blonde Katy

 On Twitter.



Anti-Lockdown Protests in Britain

At London's Daily Mail, "At least 22 are arrested after anti-lockdown protesters chanting 'freedom' clash with police as hundreds march against Covid restrictions through streets of Bournemouth, Liverpool, Basildon and Hyde Park":

In Basildon, Essex, footage today captured police clash with protesters amid a 'large unauthorised gathering' in the town centre. 
The protest, which breached the Government's Covid-19 measures, led to several arrests after 'attempts to engage with those attending were unsuccessful', Essex Police said. 
Officers have put a dispersal order in place within the boundaries of Great Oaks and Southernhay, with the force adding: 'We know this is a challenging time but we all have a responsibility to follow the regulations and keep each other safe.'

Intersectionality Has Turned on the Left

A fantastic piece, at American Greatness:


Repulsive Doctrines Drive Away Voters 

The Left needs to understand the lessons this year has taught us. Intersectionality works as much for the Republicans as it does for the Democrats.

Here is why. If the overall tone of the victim coalition is shrill and accusatory, then every victim group alienates its designated oppressor. While the victim groups ostensibly should join forces under the Democrats, the alienated groups accused by the victim groups join forces under the conservatives, canceling out the entire exercise.

#MeToo terrifies and exasperates men, many of whom are people of color and/or gay. Black Lives Matter starts to vex not only whites, but other non-black groups such as Latinos and Asians, many of whom are women and/or gay. LGBTQ has the unique distinction of inflicting discomfort and uneasiness on people who like the opposite sex, people who like the genitalia with which they were born, people who are attracted to only one sex, people who perceive normal male-female sex as healthier and better for families, and random people who think it’s creepy to have nightclub erotic performers in drag read books like Jacob Has a New Dress to a crowd of toddlers.

While feminism, in theory, should rally women to the Democrats, a lot of women happen to be white and don’t appreciate being called vulgar names by Black Lives Matter activists. Asian and Latina women don’t necessarily like the aggression and nihilistic tone of Black Lives Matter. And lots of women like the idea that they can call a local police department for help.

If you take the women compelled by #MeToo and subtract all these women who don’t want the cops to be defunded or don’t appreciate being called names on a street corner by someone brandishing a portrait of George Floyd, you find that the Democrats probably lost as many women as they gained by this particular exercise in coalition-building.

Certainly many Latinos and Asians agree with the idea that racism is wrong. But many Latinos and Asians disagree with the notion that burning down stores and smashing business windows is a good way to express this belief. A lot of immigrants fled to the United States from Latin American or Asian countries to get away from violence, repression, and bleak economic chances; they often came here to start the kind of businesses that urban rioters sack when they get angry over police shootings.

As Black Lives Matter grew more insistent on focusing on “black and indigenous” peoples only, Latinos and Asians saw the writing on the wall. If it comes down to a race war, they’re not going to be given a pass simply because they’re not white. It’s no surprise that as Black Lives Matter protests continued through the long hot summer, more and more rallies materialized in support of Trump, with a new kind of right-wing identity politics: Cubans for Trump, Amish for Trump, Chinese Americans for Trump, Indians for Trump, Colombians for Trump, and so on and so on.

For all the people the Left may have rallied to its side by way of Black Lives Matter, the Left probably lost just as many “people of color” since most people of color had become reclassified as the oppressor somewhere along the way...

RTWT.

 

Margaret Thatcher Restored Britain's Standing in the World (VIDEO)

It's Niall Ferguson, for Prager University:

Holiday Shopping

*BUMPED.*

I should probably be promoting my Amazon sales. It's not that I've been slacking. It's the online remote instruction during the California lockdown (re-uppped lockdown, as it turns out). I'm swamped with work, a lot of it time-consuming, energy-wasting administrative work (paperwork), with people who are literally incompetent at their jobs.

Oh well, I don't blog for the money, obviously. But I love posting Amazon links, especially to books, as you can tell. 

So, if you're in the mood, you can shop my associates links, at the frequent Amazon sales blog posts, or at the banner links at the sidebar. It's much appreciated. Maybe I can afford some oysters and olives to go with the dressing for Thanksgiving dinner. (Just kidding, lol.)





Wednesday, November 18, 2020

Between Freedom and Communism

 This is really essential and should be assigned widely in high school and college classes.

At the Epoch Times, "Election Fallout Reveals Battle Between Freedom and Communism: A choice that transcends the political right and left":


When the founders of our newspaper fled a communist regime to come to America, they never expected that this great nation would one day become the focal point of the battle between communism and freedom.

Many Americans believe communism is an abstract concept, something that only affects faraway nations, without realizing that it has already arrived at our doorstep.

Communism has spread in America under names such as socialism, progressivism, liberalism, neo-Marxism, and so on, in a slow process over decades of systematic subversion by first the Soviet Union, and now the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

This cumulative battle for the future of America—and with it, the rest of the world—is now coming to a head in the U.S. presidential election.

This is a conflict that transcends partisanship and party affiliation.

Belief in God has always been fundamental to America. The early colonists fled here so that they could practice their religion freely. This nation was founded on the belief that we are all created equal by God and endowed by the Creator with our rights. The U.S. motto is “In God we trust.”

Belief in God and the principles derived from that belief are the fundamental reasons why the United States can enjoy freedom, democracy, and prosperity, and why the United States has become the nation it is today.

In this great tradition, voting is a sacred duty in which each citizen may take responsibility for who governs. This year, a record number of Americans voted to choose their next leader.

We have since learned that this process has been subverted. Numerous credible allegations of voter fraud have emerged, pointing to a systematic effort to change the outcome of the election.

The far-left and the communist devil behind it—the same force that Karl Marx once described as haunting Europe—are using lies, fraud, and manipulation in an attempt to deprive the people of their rights and freedoms.

One of the two major U.S. parties, the Democratic Party, is no longer the political party it used to be. Over the decades, it has gradually been infiltrated by the same Marxist ideology that has created the most brutal and repressive communist regimes in history.

Communist ideology, including socialism and its associated ideas, is not a normal ideology. It is the ideology that has caused the unnatural deaths of at least 100 million people.

The communist ideology uses seemingly righteous concepts, such as “equality” and “political correctness,” to confuse people. Its ideology has infiltrated all fields in our society, including education, media, and art. It unscrupulously destroys everything that is traditional, including faith, religion, morality, culture, family, art, education, law, and so on, and leads people to fall into moral depravity.

This is the ideology of totalitarianism, one that drives once-thriving nations such as Venezuela into the abyss and that was able to destroy 5,000 years of culture in China, where people went from a belief in the divine to a devotion to the state.

It is the systematic undoing of all that is good that humankind stands for. It stands diametrically opposed to goodness, fairness, truth, and compassion.

This not only has undermined people’s spirits and their righteous faith in God, but has dragged the American people and all of mankind to the brink of danger.

A Choice Between Good and Evil This is a conflict that transcends party lines, a battle between whether we as Americans can stay true to our founding principles and follow God’s will, or whether we will be subjected to forces that seek to control and destroy our most fundamental rights.

This is not something we say lightly; because our newspaper’s founders lived through communist totalitarianism, they understand its destructive force.

As a media organization, we are independent and don’t take positions on political issues or candidates, but rather stand for truth and justice.

America has now come to the brink of falling into a communist abyss...

Keep reading.

 

Alex Berenson, Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns

At Amazon, Alex Berenson, Unreported Truths about COVID-19 and Lockdowns: Part 1: Introduction and Death Counts and Estimates.





Sunday, November 15, 2020

William G. Howell and Terry M. Moe, Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy

At Amazon, William G. Howell and Terry M. Moe, Presidents, Populism, and the Crisis of Democracy.




With Trench Warfare Deepening, Parties Face Unsettled Electoral Map

This is good.

At NYT, "Voters delivered a convincing victory for Joe Biden, but a split decision for the two parties. Now Democrats and Republicans face perhaps the most up-for-grabs electoral landscape in a generation":
WASHINGTON — America’s two major parties had hoped the 2020 presidential election would render a decisive judgment on the country’s political trajectory. But after a race that broke records for voter turnout and campaign spending, neither Democrats nor Republicans have achieved a dominant upper hand.

Instead, the election delivered a split decision, ousting President Trump but narrowing the Democratic majority in the House and perhaps preserving the Republican majority in the Senate. As Joseph R. Biden Jr. prepares to take office and preside over a closely divided government, leaders in both camps are acknowledging that voters seem to have issued not a mandate for the left or the right but a muddled plea to move on from Trump-style chaos.

With 306 electoral college votes and the most popular votes of any presidential candidate in history, Mr. Biden attained a victory that was paramount to many Democrats, who saw a second Trump term as nothing less than a threat to democracy.

Yet on the electoral landscape, both parties find themselves stretched thin and battling on new fronts, with their traditional strongholds increasingly under siege. Indeed, Democrats and Republicans are facing perhaps the most unsettled and up-for-grabs electoral map the country has seen in a generation, since the parties were still fighting over California in the late 1980s.

This competition has denied either from being able to claim broad majorities and prompted a series of election cycles, which could be repeated in 2022, in which any gains Democrats make in the country’s booming cities and states are at least partly offset by growing Republican strength in rural areas.

The election also represented a continuation of this trench warfare between two parties that are increasingly defined by their activist flanks and limited to only incremental advances.

“We are more divided than any other time in my lifetime,” said Haley Barbour, the former Mississippi governor and Republican National Committee chair, whose first job in politics was on Richard M. Nixon’s 1968 campaign. “But usually when we’re at parity we’re bunched up in the middle — now we’ve got parity but with extreme polarity.”

Mr. Biden and the Democrats viewed this election as an opportunity to deliver a crushing repudiation to Republicans and the movement known as Trumpism, while Mr. Trump and his allies saw the chance to cement a durable governing coalition led by the far right...

RTWT.

 

Thursday, November 12, 2020

'My Digital Landscape'

I'm shaking my head. 

Over at Legal Insurrection, blogger Leslie Eastman is upset with the mainstream media. See, "My digital landscape is changing post election."

What, is she the right-blogger version of Rip Van Winkle, just waking up after four years and sees she doesn't like the leftist press? Pfft. 

I changed my "digital landscape" years ago, and especially in 2016 when Trump won. And now she's mad at Fox News? I rarely watch it. Bret Baer drives me crazy. Neil Cavuto's a clown. They booted Shepard Smith a while back, and that barely made any difference in the leftist drift at the network. 

She along with millions of other right-wing voters are mad at Fox News and any outlets that don't parrot the MAGA line. So, they're bellowing about how they're never going to watch Fox News again! (*Eye-roll*)

Look, I've said it a million times: Know your enemy. If conservatives further segregate themselves in an information bubble it will only exacerbate existing divides. We'll keep drifting toward two nations, and political violence will become more and more acceptable. A lot of folks don't care, okay? Then quit blogging and fighting about it all the time, because it's useless. Just pack up now to Idaho. Get your supplies, provisions, and ammo. Hunker down and wait for the new millennium. 

I'm not doing that. Not yet. I'll worry about moving to the hinterland when I retire. 

I read and blog mainstream articles all the time. I actually like reading the L.A. Times and the N.Y. Times. If you're open minded, there's lots of cool stuff. Here's a good piece on Dave Grohl keeping it real during the pandemic, "Dave Grohl, 10-Year-Old Nandi Bushell and One Very Epic Drum Battle."


You didn’t need to know every note of Nirvana’s angst-rock classic “In Bloom” to marvel at the spectacle of a little girl drumming along to the song in perfect synchronization last November, her face scrawled over with joy and passion.

The internet is an open playing field for regular people performing impressive feats, and over a couple of years, Nandi Bushell, a resident of Ipswich, England, had attracted a solid audience by expressively covering famous songs by a genre-diverse range of artists including the White Stripes, Billie Eilish and Anderson .Paak. Sometimes her father, John, and brother, Thomas, accompanied her, but Bushell was the star, combining technical virtuosity with bright-eyed showmanship (and some enthusiastic yelling).

The sight of Bushell wailing away immediately impressed Dave Grohl, the Foo Fighters frontman and former Nirvana drummer who played “In Bloom” on the band’s 1991 breakthrough album, “Nevermind.” Grohl is not a social media user, and he only learned about the viral clip when the album’s producer, Butch Vig, sent it to him.

“I watched it in amazement, not only because she was nailing all of the parts, but the way that she would scream when she did her drum rolls,” Grohl said in a recent video interview. “There’s something about seeing the joy and energy of a kid in love with an instrument. She just seemed like a force of nature.”

*****

Not everything's politics. Leftist take to politics in place of religion. Conservatives need to avoid that like the plague. Just read widely, fitting your tastes. Watch Newsmax on YouTube, where streaming is no charge. 

And everybody should be reading Instapundit daily. I should be reading over there more often, frankly, as well as AoSHQ. And don't quit Fox. I mean, don't quit Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham. They're great. If it wasn't for them, there'd be absolutely no conservative programming on prime-time network television in this country. If you don't support them, you're hibernating. You're cutting off your nose to spite your face. Sheesh, just flip the channel and watch something else if you can't stand Martha MacCallum. 

And everybody's saying they're quitting Twitter to go to Parler? Why? I mean, what's so great about it? And Gab? Great place for neo-Nazis to gather, but not for me. 

Besides, nobodies over there anyway. All the mainstream journalists are on Twitter. I follow them. (A lot of them.) Not because I like them, but because they might have some information I need. Frankly, I hate them, but they're useful. It's transactional. Don't get emotional about these things. If I'm booted off Twitter, then I won't use a short-message service. And Facebook? It's a lost cause. I quit using it the day after Trump won in 2016. I couldn't take it anymore. It was HATE, HATE, HATE nonstop. I can do without. I'm starting to post links to Facebook again, for the hell of it. But I don't linger. I don't read the comments. Fuck 'em, and I'm talking about people on both sides who act like spoiled children. It's pathetic and ridiculous. People need to grow up and get a grip. Don't transmogrify into that which you hate. 

I set my Twitter page to private (send a follower request there, if you want to see my tweets). And I took my personal information off my Blogger profile. I'm still employed at my college, and after the last 12 years of blogging, and tweeting, and teaching my college classes, I've decided to finally go incognito a bit. They will try to cancel you. Leftists will come after you at your place of employment. Far-left cadres on the job will undermine you and try to get you fired. I'm a tenure professor, and I still have to take all these precautions. I should've started blogging under a pseudonym in 2006, but I was stupid. I thought I'd be some be blog professor and build some scholarly readership, or some bullshit. Nobody cares about that. It's all political warfare all the time. Every institution of American life is infected with critical race theory ideology and you need to protect your family. California's going to decriminalize mushrooms. Don't get me wrong, I'm up for a good psilocybin trip just like the next guy, but what about the children?!! Well, leftists don't care about your kids. They're out to destroy the nuclear family and they're doing a bang-up job of it. Get out of California while you still can. 
 
California's a beautiful but bad state. I'm stuck here until I retire, so I'm just gonna chill and not get steamed up about it. 

Anyway, read and watch what you want. Don't let folks on either side dictate your choices, and if they do, fuck 'em. 

More later...

'But as someone pointed out earlier, with AOC being blamed, justifiably, by many Democrats for her party’s poor performance, she has to change the subject. And changing the subject from abject failures, to internal enemies, is also a classic part of leftism in action...'

"B--, b--, but, ... they didn't run any Facebook ads! Its' campaign malpractice!"

Heh, he's right. Changing the subject. 

It's Glenn Reynolds, at Instapundit, "LISTS AND PUNISHMENTS ARE THE WHOLE POINT OF BEING A LEFTIST; THE REST IS JUST WINDOW-DRESSING: AOC & Co.’s loathsome plan to keep lists of pro-Trumpies."


The Most Extensive Psychological Warfare Operation in History

Roosh:

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Megan Kelley: 'Pennsylvania is my favorite challenge' (VIDEO)

This video is incredible.

She's not about to set unrealistic expectations, and I agree that a lot of the challenges are long shots, but keep listening to the part about Joe Biden and his hilarious cluelessness and his ridiculously laughable calls for "unity."

At Newmax, which should be one of your main information pickup stations starting now. 

Tuesday, November 10, 2020

Fighting Election Results, Trump Employs a New Weapon: The Government

I know most Trump supporters hate the New York Times, but if you want to beat your enemy, you need to know him. And sometimes the Old Gray Lady serves it up for us on a platter.

I love this piece:

WASHINGTON — President Trump, facing the prospect of leaving the White House in defeat in just 70 days, is harnessing the power of the federal government to resist the results of an election that he lost, something that no sitting president has done in American history.

In the latest sign of defiance, the president’s senior cabinet secretary fueled concerns on Tuesday that Mr. Trump would resist handing over power to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. after legal challenges to the vote. “There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said.

Mr. Trump’s attorney general has at the same time authorized investigations into supposed vote fraud, his general services administrator has refused to give Mr. Biden’s team access to transition offices and resources guaranteed under law and the White House is preparing a budget for next year as if Mr. Trump will be around to present it.

The president has also embarked on a shake-up of his administration, firing Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper as well as the heads of three other agencies while installing loyalists in key positions at the National Security Agency and the Pentagon. Allies expect more to come, including the possible dismissals of the directors of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.

But the rest of the world increasingly moved to accept Mr. Biden’s victory and prepared to work with him despite Mr. Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the results. Speaking with journalists, Mr. Biden called the president’s actions since Election Day “an embarrassment” that will not serve him well in the long run. “How can I say this tactfully?” Mr. Biden said. “It will not help the president’s legacy.”

The standoff left the United States in the position of the kind of country whose weak democratic processes it often criticizes. Rather than congratulating Mr. Biden and inviting him to the White House, as his predecessors traditionally have done after an election changed party control, Mr. Trump has been marshaling his administration and pressuring his Republican allies into acting as if the outcome were still uncertain, either out of faint hope of actually overturning the results or at least creating a narrative to explain his loss.

The president’s efforts to discredit with false claims both the election results and the incoming Biden administration is in many ways the culmination of four years of stocking the government with pliant appointees while undermining the credibility of other institutions in American life, including intelligence agencies, law enforcement authorities, the news media, technology companies, the federal government more broadly and now election officials in states across four time zones.

Throughout his presidency, Mr. Trump has tried to condition much of the American public not to believe anyone other than him, with evident success. Although the evidence shows there was no widespread conspiracy to steal the election in multiple states that Mr. Trump has invented, at least one poll showed that many supporters accept his claims. Seventy percent of Republicans surveyed by Politico and Morning Consult said they did not believe the election was free and fair.

“What we have seen in the last week from the president more closely resembles the tactics of the kind of authoritarian leaders we follow,” said Michael J. Abramowitz, the president of Freedom House, a nonprofit organization that tracks democracy around the world. “I never would have imagined seeing something like this in America.”

Mr. Abramowitz doubted there was much danger of Mr. Trump overturning the election. “But by convincing a large part of the population that there was widespread fraud, he is seeding a myth that could endure for years and contribute to an erosion of public confidence in our electoral system,” he said.

Mr. Biden has proceeded without waiting for Mr. Trump’s concession and spoke on Tuesday with the leaders of Britain, France, Germany and Ireland.

In Scathing Memo, Extemist Jihadi Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib Lashes Out at Moderate Dems for Enabling GOP's 'Divide-and-Conquer Racism'

Wow!

Trolling Level Off the Charts

At Weasel Zippers, "[Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo: There Will Be a Smooth Transition From First to Second Term Trump…"

Jill Schlesinger Talks Surging Dow (VIDEO)

"Stock markets got a major boost from news of Pfizer’s #coronavirus vaccine trial success, and the results from #Election2020."

Yeah, and Trump should be getting the political credit for the vaccine, but you know, the pharma-deep state coordinated with the Biden campaign to delay the news of the successful trial? I mean, c'mon, a 90 percent success rate isn't something to be hiding, that is, unless you're colluding with the Democrat-Media-Complex.

At CBS This Morning: 


I'm glad my Roth IRA and 403(b) retirement funds are recovering, sheesh. 

New Playmate Iryna

Thank gawd lol.


Ms. Katie Update

 On Twitter:

And previously: "Wonderful Ms. Katie."


'I don't know why I'm convinced I get Mick Jagger, but this...'

According to Althouse:
This is sarcasm .... I got there via Ed Driscoll at Instapundit who doesn't seem to be reading Mick's tweet as humor, but come on.

'My daughter has already noticed that the folks in her circle who are most into ‘activism’ of various sorts are mostly the ones whose careers and lives seem to be going the worst.” And this is certainly not a coincidence. Political “activism,” as promoted by the Left, is entirely destructive in its goals. An eternal war against an unacceptable status quo appeals to malcontents and misfits...'

That's Glenn Reynolds, quoted at the Other McCain, "The Enemies of Happiness."

Portland's antifa scum as a case in point:




Mitch McConnell Tells Democrats He Doesn't Want Lectures From Them or Their Mobs as He Supports President Trump's Election Challenge (VIDEO)

 Via Red State:


Monday, November 9, 2020

'Today I Woke Up Ready to Fight'

See LoveBreedsAccountability, "FRAUD-20 Superspreader Creates Immediate Need for Ballot Testing, Testing, Testing":

Yesterday I prepared myself for the absolute worst. We are potentially at an end-times level crisis point for our nation and I needed to take a minute to process that and the implications. And, miraculously somehow, I came out the other side of yesterday feeling prepared for whatever happens. And that was important. 
Because today I woke up feeling good. Today I woke up hopeful. Today I woke up unafraid. 
Today I woke up ready to fight...

Keep reading.  


Charles Kupchan, Isolationism

Charles Kupchan, Isolationism: A History of America's Efforts to Shield Itself from the World.




Mark Levin, Unfreedom of the Press

At Amazon, Mark Levin, Unfreedom of the Press.



'Top Republicans in Washington are reluctant to call Joe Biden the president-elect publicly, fearing a rebellion by grassroots conservatives loyal to President Trump that would sink the party's Senate majority...'

From David M. Drucker, at the Washington Examiner, via Memeorandum, "GOP fears conceding Trump loss would spark base revolt and loss of seats."


This Woman Just Invited Me for a Beer

 It's Tania Gail, on Facebook. I have't seen her since CPAC 2011. She moved to Idaho and wants to go out for a beer lol. 

I'll keep you posted, heh. 



Class Conflict Will Cripple the Democrats

It's Steve McCann, at American Thinker:

*****
 
In the midst of the post-election chaos a long-time acquaintance, who is a robotic Democrat voter, texted me “With Biden the violence and riots in the streets of the big cities will stop. That is why he needs to win.”  

I texted back: “Not so fast my friend.  If Biden wins, within six to twelve months the riots will get worse and more violent.  Which is among the primary reasons why Trump must leave no stone unturned in contesting the election."

Besides if the Biden cabal steals the election, Trump must make certain the American people know the full extent of the fraud.  The Biden presidency must begin with a dark cloud hanging over it after what Trump and his 70+ million supporters have endured for the past four years including the 2020 election.”

If Biden were to prevail and be sworn in as President on January 20, 2021, it will be solely due to his party executing the greatest fraud in American political history, along with considerable help.  The Democrats’ co-conspirators in the Ruling Class provide financial and media collaboration, while the radical American left, with their organizing ability and willingness to unabashedly break election laws to justify the ends, provide the muscle.

*****


Progressives Want Revolution, Not Just Change

It's Philip Giraldi, at the Unz Reader, "The Disappearing America."

Jean-François Revel, How Democracies Perish

At Amazon,Jean-François Revel, How Democracies Perish.




U.K.'s Lord Kilclooney Called Out for Calling Kamala Harris 'the Indian'

He isn't wrong you know, although he's not too smart about our constitutional system. If the "Indian" become president, she'll appoint a new vice president who'll be confirmed by a majority vote in both the House and Senate.

Great story, in any case.

At NYT, "British Peer Criticized for Calling Kamala Harris ‘the Indian’."


Lindsey Pelas Brightening the Day

 Seen on Twitter:




Would the Party of Moral Authoritarianism Cheat on Elections?

Nah. At Issues & Insights, "Of Course the Party of Moral Authoritarianism Would Cheat on Elections":
The moral authoritarians of the left are so hungry to rule over others, so convinced of their own virtue that they will do almost anything to muscle a path to unchallengeable authority. In their minds, stealing an election is a legitimate means to their ends.

Fight them. Defeat them. Never stop. 

 

What Socialism? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Walks Back Radical Democrat Agenda After Epic Shellacking on November 3rd (VIDEO)

They're liars. They're pathological liars. And they're dangerous. Especially AOC. 

Fight them. Beat them. Destroy them. 

At Free Beacon, "Dems Turn Away From ‘Defund the Police’ and ‘Socialism’." 


Jennifer Delacruz's Monday Forecast

 We ha some winter weather this weekend, and I think it's here to stay for a while.

Let's hear it from the fabulous Ms. Jennifer, for ABC News 10 San Diego:



Sunday, November 8, 2020

Maggie Haberman is Quitting the Trump Beat

Her job is done. 

She, by the tone of the piece, almost single-handedly destroyed the Trump presidency. 

At NYT, "The Trump Presidency Is Ending. So Is Maggie Haberman’s Wild Ride."

I like her, actually, but she's a stone-cold bitch. 



The Election Week Travails of a Die-Hard Massachusetts Trump Supporter

This could be the story of untold millions of Americans. You gotta love it. And especially the elite media-prog condescension. 

See, "For a Trump Fan, a Week When Victory Ebbed Away":



Thursday, Nov. 5

By Thursday morning, the Roccos had given up on Fox. “There’s definitely people at Fox who don’t like Trump,” Mr. Rocco said. “The commentators, they are normally aggressive. I think they got a leash put on them somehow, some way.”

He took the position that the vote count should have ended on Nov. 3. He reassured his wife that the decision would finally lie in the hands of the Supreme Court.

“They’re doing anything they can to stop him from becoming president,” he said. “It’s not over yet. He’s going to win. It’s just a matter of who has the balls to close down first.”

But an alternative path was beginning to take shape in his mind, in case Mr. Biden prevailed.

Maybe the Republicans could impeach Mr. Biden. Maybe a Republican Senate could tie his hands for four years. Maybe, after a long-planned Caribbean vacation, Mr. Rocco would fly out to Arizona and join the protesters. Maybe he would post new yard signs.

“Like I told you, I hate to lose,” he said. “If he loses, I’ll feel like I’ve lost.”

When Mr. Trump delivered remarks at the White House, Mr. Rocco was struck by his appearance. The president looked drained and serious, no longer a happy warrior. The message the president conveyed was grave: that American democracy is a farce.

“He’s been telling us about that for months, and I think it’s actually happening now,” he said. “How are we ever going to be able to vote for a president again, now that we know that fraud has been going on?”

Friday, Nov. 6

The news on Friday morning was no surprise. Officials in states that had not been called had spent much of the night meticulously counting ballots, in the presence of observers from both parties.

Mr. Biden was a hair’s breadth from the presidency, on course to win at least 270 electoral votes.

“Every time I went to bed, it was the same,” Mr. Rocco said. “I go to bed, he was winning, I wake up, he was losing.”

Ms. Rocco sounded resigned. “I think that basically it’s pretty much done,” she said. “But they cheated. But it’s done.”

The people she had spent the summer with, the Trump activists, she could see them packing it in, returning to normal life.

“They’re just going to want to move on,” she said. “My aunt’s already saying, ‘Stop being a crybaby.’”

Mr. Rocco was not ready to give up, though. The president would not concede, he was sure of that. “I’d be pissed at him if he did because I would never do that,” he said. “He’s not that type of person. He doesn’t give up easily. I see a lot of myself in him.”

Casting his mind into the future, past this election, he could imagine any number of outcomes.

He could imagine the United States splitting into two countries, one governed by Mr. Trump and one not. He could imagine suspending elections so Mr. Trump and his family could rule without interruption for 20 years.

“I guarantee you, Trump supporters would not care,” he said. “I guarantee you, if you got 69 million Trump supporters, and you said, ‘Would you be good with Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump and Ivanka Trump as president?’ a lot of people would be 100 percent behind that.”

He was gathering his things — he had a shift at the salon — and his tone was calm. He is only 26. There is plenty of time. He was waiting for cues from his leader.

“In Trump we trust, and as far as everything else, it’s all going to fall into place,” he said. “It’s not happening today, and it’s not happening tomorrow.”

Abigail Shrier: My Book's Getting Cancelled by Silicon Valley Gender Activists (VIDEO)


At Quillette, Abigail Shrier, "Gender Activists Are Trying to Cancel My Book. Why is Silicon Valley Helping Them?":

*****

The notion that this sudden wave of transitioning among teens is a worrying, ideologically driven phenomenon is hardly a fringe view. Indeed, outside of Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and college campuses, it is a view held by a majority of Americans. There is nothing hateful in suggesting that most teenagers are not in a good position to approve irreversible alterations to their bodies, particularly if they are suffering from trauma, OCD, depression, or any of the other mental-health problems that are comorbid with expressions of dysphoria. And yet, here we are.

The efforts to block my reporting have been legion, starting with staff threats at a publishing house, which quickly reversed its original intention to publish my book. Once I obtained a stalwart publisher, Regnery, Amazon refused to allow that company’s sales team to sponsor ads on its site. (Amazon allows sponsored ads for books that uncritically celebrate medical transition for teenagers).

Because the book tackles an interesting phenomenon, a number of established journalists wanted to review it. The issue of trans-identification has seemed to come out of nowhere with Gen Z, the generation begun in 1995 whose large-scale mental-health crisis already has us so on edge. And the issue has created surprising bedfellows. Religious conservatives are concerned about the trend—but so are lesbians, who look upon the shocking numbers of teen girls transitioning with abject alarm. Many suspect that all this transitioning of girls is effectively euthanizing a generation of young lesbians.

In any case, every major newspaper and legacy magazine summarily turned interested journalists down. Whether they would have reviewed my book favorably or unfavorably, I have no idea—and it doesn’t matter. Kirkus, which reviews 10,000 titles per year, including self-published and obscure works—pretended my book didn’t exist. Its editors, too busy heaping praise on the Trans Teen Survival Guide, When Aiden Became a Brother, Jack (Not Jackie), Rethinking Normal, and of course, Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out.

Alternative media rushed in where legacy media feared to go. Joe Rogan hosted me on his show, and for two hours, we explored why a growing number of researchers believe social contagion is at play when clusters of girls suddenly announce, as if as one, that they are boys. Gender dysphoria has always existed, but until recently, afflicted males almost exclusively. While gender dysphoria has always been vanishingly rare among females, social contagion has not. These are the same high-anxiety, depressive (mostly white) girls who, in previous decades, fell prey to anorexia and bulimia or multiple personality disorder. Now it’s gender dysphoria, sometimes along with some or all of those other conditions. Parents are being presented with the seductive idea of transition as a utopian cure-all... 

*****

And at the Joe Rogan Experience:

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem: 'Election Day Needs to Be Fair, Honest, and Transparent, and We Need to Be Sure We Had an Honest Election Before We Decide Who Gets to Be in the White House...'

She's so cool, calm, and collected, and George Stephanopoulos is left nearly speechless and bumbling, "Buh buh but Governor Noam, do you have any evidence that it wasn't an honest election...", blather, spittle, dribble, belch!

At ABC News, on our country's most dangerous news organizations:

Trump Won’t Concede Election Amid Several Lawsuits, Challenges

 At the Epoch Times, "Rudy Giuliani: Trump Won’t Concede Election Amid Several Lawsuits, Challenges":

Former New York City Mayor and President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani said the president will not concede the election amid a series of lawsuits filed by Trump’s campaign.

Several news outlets and Democratic challenger Joe Biden declared victory on Saturday.

“Obviously he’s not going to concede when at least 600,000 ballots are in question,” Giuliani told reporters in Philadelphia on Saturday.

Giuliani alleged that ballots were tampered with in Pennsylvania, which appeared to give Biden an Electoral College win needed to take the White House. Trump was leading in the state on Tuesday night, but after counting apparently started again on Wednesday, Biden appeared to cut into the president’s lead.

Giuliani said he has statements from several election watchers and said 50 people had similar stories about possible fraud being committed.

“I could have brought about 50 with me,” Giuliani said, adding that “50 is too many,” alleging that some were afraid of retribution.

Trump’s team will file federal lawsuits alleging the “uniform deprivation of the right to inspect,” while adding that the “Democratic machine in Philadelphia” was involved in tampering with the election in the city.

“Seems to me somebody from the Democratic National Committee sent out a note that said don’t let the Republicans look at those mail-in ballots,” Giuliani added.

Giuliani said that Biden’s lead increase after Tuesday’s election is proof there is something amiss in the process.

“You just don’t lose leads like that without corruption,” Giuliani said.

The Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General issued a statement for the state’s Democratic secretary of state, Kathy Boockvar, saying that there is “no evidence” that a county is “disobeying that clear guidance to segregate these votes, and the Republican Party offers only speculation that certain unidentified counties may ignore that repeated guidance or that the Secretary will inconsistently change course.”

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who handles emergency appeals for Pennsylvania, ordered the state’s county elections officials to keep mail-in ballots segregated if they arrived after 8 p.m. on Tuesday.

On Saturday, in Arizona, another battleground state, Trump continued to cut into Biden’s lead. Biden has seen his lead dwindle to just 10,000 votes on Nov. 8. If the margin between Biden and Trump ends up falling within 0.1 percent or less, an automatic recount will be triggered.

Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, said that elections officials are working on counting the votes...

The Left is Not What It Claims to Be

It's Paul Godfried, "The Modern Left Is Not Marxist, It's Worse":

*****

Is the current left Marxist? In a provocative commentary, Bill Lind explores this genealogical question, and, unless I’m mistaken, the left and much of its media opposition would second his conclusions. Since Antifa describes itself as Marxist, when it’s not calling itself anarchist, and since leading figures of the Democratic Party, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have certainly not shunned the Marxist label, it would seem today’s left is authentically Marxist.

But, except at its edges, the present left is not what it claims to be. Today’s left has a different origin and orientation from what has been historically understood as Marxist or Marxist-Leninist; and using that term to designate the characteristics of our current left is at best problematic. Neither Marxists nor Marxist-Leninist governments evidenced the cultural radicalism that today’s left expresses every day. Although there have been Communist Party members in Western countries who have been sexual exhibitionists, and even a brief period in Russia after the November 1917 Revolution when free love was allowed, generally communists have been on the conservative side of issues like homosexuality and the questioning of fixed sexual identities. The traditional left would have attributed our LGBT activities to “bourgeois decadence.”

In the Soviet Union and for a long time throughout the Soviet bloc, artistic experimentation was frowned upon, including music of the Second Viennese School’s twelve-tone technique, as well as abstract expressionism. Communist regimes sent gays to labor camps, and communist revolutionaries like Fidel Castro and Che Guevara raged against homosexuality and, in Guevara’s case, blacks.

It is hard to view these Marxist revolutionaries as precursors of the present intersectional left. Indeed, corporate capitalists stand much closer to this force than traditional Marxists do or did. Are the executives at PepsiCo, Citibank, and the NFL, who support Black Lives Matter (BLM) and wish to stamp out opposition from the cultural right, economic revolutionaries yearning for a socialist society? Pardon my skepticism!

Real Marxism has been about socioeconomic contradictions and transformations, not about the need for transgendered restrooms and the abolition of gender roles. Communist parties in Western Europe after World War II vehemently opposed the immigration of cheap labor from abroad, viewing it as an attack on the indigenous workforce. The current left, by contrast, is about open borders and filling Western countries with impoverished Third World populations as an act of contrition for white Christian racism, or as a source of so-called cultural enrichment.

The Soviet regime and Communist parties outside the Soviet Union condemned the Critical Theory philosophy of the Frankfurt School as a distortion of Marxism. One can only imagine what they would have thought of the further evolution of what Lind and others have styled “cultural Marxism.” Lind correctly observes that the Frankfurt School in interwar Germany provided the cradle for this movement, which tried to fuse Freud’s theories about sexual repression with socialist economics. But the result looked much more like a cultural war against reactionary social attitudes than a serious effort to plan a Marxist economy.

After Critical Theory migrated to the U.S. by way of Columbia University in the 1930s, it came to look even less like Marxism and much more like a prelude to our current cultural revolution. Some socialist boilerplate remained attached to this brand of thinking, but it became extraneous to its real message, which is the subversion of what seemed to me as a child in the 1950s to be a normal society.

I am unwilling to concede to cultural Marxists a Marxist pedigree simply because they have claimed that ancestry. Nowadays, media and political celebrities claim all kinds of labels for themselves, and one can easily prove the falseness of most of them. What makes a lesbian feminist on Fox News a “conservative” other than the fact that she appears on a generally Republican channel and claims that she votes for the GOP? What makes a culturally radical commentator on CNN a “liberal” other than the fact that some in high places decided to apply this term to themselves? What does columnist Jonah Goldberg have in common politically or philosophically with Edmund Burke, or for that matter, CNN anchor Jake Tapper with Thomas Jefferson? If I decide to call myself something I am not, it does not become any more true regardless of how much media support I can find to back me up.

I concede to Lind that today’s cultural radicals, who are unfortunately becoming mainstream, are of the left. They are leftists because they are driven by four defining leftist principles or practices. One is globalism or universalism, which in the case of the current left takes the form of a boundless revulsion for Western Christian society and its majority white population. The left in its essence denies particularity and the sanctity of local and national traditions.

The second quintessentially leftist principle that informs our cultural revolutionaries is the worship of equality as the highest value. One can easily imagine non-leftists recognizing some limited good in the idea of equality, for example, granting legal equality to all authorized citizens or subjects of a state. But the left is fixated on equality and seeks to harness political and educational power to obliterate human distinctions.

The third leftist principle or practice is the call for expansions of what they call human rights, since the historically grounded natural rights do not advance equality or “human dignity,” by which they mean the extinction of social and historical distinctions. This inverts Aristotle’s sage advice at the beginning of Book Four of the Politics, that laws (nomoi) should fit specific governments (politeiai). The leftist position is exactly the opposite: Long established customs and conventions should give way to what journalists and academics deem conducive to greater equality.

A fourth leftist belief concerns the putative fluidity and malleability of human nature, seen for example in the insistence that all gender identities are subject to change. Public administrators and courts must defend our right to redefine our gender whenever we want; and others should then be required to treat us in accordance with our changing gender identity. This last leftist belief stands in striking contrast to the conservative notion that human identities are rooted in tradition and nature. Perhaps nowhere more than in this emphasis on gender fluidity do we behold the most radical form of the left, perhaps in an even more grotesque manifestation than in such harebrained schemes as nationalizing the economy...

*****

Still more at that link.