Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Leftists destroyed this man's life as a political vendetta. He was convicted on a "process" crime with no substantial underlying linkage to the allegations of electoral collusion with the Russians.
Now he's received a presidential pardon, but how does someone rebuild one's life --- a life of patriotism and exemplary national service --- after a diabolical ideological smear campaign like this?
It is my Great Honor to announce that General Michael T. Flynn has been granted a Full Pardon. Congratulations to @GenFlynn and his wonderful family, I know you will now have a truly fantastic Thanksgiving!
In a particularly grueling miscarriage of justice, retired general Michael Flynn had to be pardoned for a crime of which he was innocent. Investigated by the FBI at the behest of President Obama, who decided for some reason that Flynn was a Russian spy, Flynn was cleared of all charges as a result of the investigation. The FBI closed the case.
He was prosecuted anyway by a politicized Department of Justice, which nevertheless failed to produce the only piece of evidence it allegedly had against him. That evidence would have been the original "302" form showing that the FBI agents who interviewed him thought that he'd lied to them -- about a case in which the FBI had already cleared him. No such 302 was ever produced, allegedly being lost, but we do have one that we happen to know was edited long after the fact by disgraced liar and political agent Peter Strzok. We know this because he discussed it in unencrypted text messages with his lover, also-married disgraced former prosecutor Lisa Page.
After a financially ruinous prosecution in which the FBI/DOJ produced almost none of the exculpatory evidence that the law requires them to produce -- including the record of the investigation that completely cleared him on all charges -- Flynn's sorry lawyers convinced him to plead guilty. This was done in such a way that the DOJ and his sorry lawyers (perhaps motivated by one of their partners, a former Obama attorney general) made an illegal deal to hide the agreement not to prosecute Flynn's son from the judge! Not only did the judge lack the information he needed to discern whether the guilty plea was coerced, anyone against whom Flynn later might have testified as a result of the deal would have been denied their constitutional right to know of the deal so they could raise it as a defense against the value of his testimony.
That judge -- a personal friend of Obama's, it turns out -- wasn't upset about the fact that the law firm and the DOJ conspired to hide these facts from him in violation of the law. His ire was for Flynn, whom he accused of selling out his country even though the DOJ had never even attempted to charge Flynn with that. What they charged him with was perjury for "lying" to the FBI (in the vanished 302), and a paperwork violation for which the FBI investigation had already cleared him.
(They cleared him of the FARA violation because he had in fact filed paperwork with the government under another act, on the advice of lawyers he hired specifically to help him meet the legal reporting requirements -- thus, he had not tried to hide his lobbying work for a NATO ally, and clearly they could not s how criminal intent. DOJ knew all of that and made him plead guilty to it anyway, if he wanted them not to send his son to prison on trumped-up charges too.)
Then we spent a year while Flynn's new lawyer, Sidney Powell, managed to get all the exculpatory information illegally hidden from him in the first place. None of it convinced the judge one bit to let Flynn withdraw the coerced guilty plea, nor to accept the DOJ's determination that it should probably actually drop those baseless charges after all. Ordered to drop the charges by the DC Court of Appeals in a three-judge ruling, the judge instead sought en banc approval to continue the case. He was granted it, provided he would dispose of the matter with "dispatch." That was now several months ago, and instead of disposing of the case he has been dragging it out towards an obvious intent to sentence Flynn in spite of his innocence.
What this case shows is how completely distorted our system has become...
Sure, these parents are literally imbeciles, especially for the fact that for all they did to get their daughters into an "elite" private university (U.S.C.'s not "elite," but that's another story), their daughters couldn't care less. Olivia Jade even attacked her mom when the scandal broke --- she slammed her for getting arrested, because it ruined her career as a YouTube influencer. The youth generation is the greatest generation of spoiled, no-talent trust-fund brats. This story has always blown me away.
Her parents' prison time seemed a distant memory as she relaxed with a dark-haired male companion wearing a dark t-shirt and blue shorts and joked around, appearing to bury her feet in the sand at one point.
Rooms at the luxury beachside getaway currently start from $806 per night, with many boasting views across the ocean.
It's a far cry from the current dwellings of her parents who are both serving time in California prisons for their parts in the college admissions scandal.
Loughlin, 56, started her two-month sentence at FCI Dublin in California on October 30.
She is said to have been a 'wreck' during her first few weeks behind bars.
A former inmate turned prison consultant told DailyMail.com this month that the mom-of-two was 'anxious about contracting COVID, is living off a diet of dry cereal and fruit and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, is sharing a cell with three other inmates and is only allowed to shower three times a week.
I love this story. I love all this winning. We've taken out Iran's terror mastermind Qassem Soleimani, and now their top doomsday scientist.
Big story, but no matter where you find it among the MSM outlets, this is a supposed to be a bad thing. Why? It looks good on President Trump and his Middle East policy. It looks good on U.S. strategy of isolating Iran behind a ring of new strategic alliances. And it affirms Israel's role once again as the undisputed hegemon in the region and the linchpin of the American the alliance posture there. I mean, all the recent peace deals, and the breakneck diplomacy? Not bad. Not bad. That is, unless you think the Obama administration's $400 billion quid pro quo pallets of cash was okey-dokey!
It's such a damn shame Biden and his fanatical appeasers are coming back to power. They won't have long though. They won't have time to fuck things up, unless Biden goes all Obama and starts yet another Middle East war.
... Maybe head out to the (Chinese?) market and do some shopping? With luck you'll bump carts (or private parts?) with an absolutely amazing woman like this, dang! (Via Funky Links.)
100 prominent French academics signed a letter affirming Blanquer’s statement, and calling for the French people to defeat an “American” ideology that preaches hatred of “whites” (a word that, unlike Trump, they explicitly used) and the indigenous Gallo-Romans of France. While the academics and Blanquer primarily blame Saudi-funded Islamist preachers for the death of Samuel Paty, they also believe US influence on their intellectuals has made it socially acceptable to murder white people.
In an interview with a French journal, Blanquer reiterated this sentiment...
Thanks to our magnificent Constitution, the various state legislatures have complete control of the electoral process. Not judges, not unelected bureaucrats, and not the "media" (also see: an infographic on Georgia's provable vote fraud issues). Thanks to Sidney Powell and her team, please note the following, massive vote fraud likely perpetrated in Michigan.
Live is good.Get out there and enjoy it.And I gotta say, lots of folks on social media are urging me to move to Florida, and I'm thinking about it!Seriously, what beauty!
They don't work. They're as privileged as you can be, benefiting from an economic system that's made them (well, their families, really) among the most fortunate people in the world. Remember that. Remember these are the young idle rich. These are the same kinds of young people whom the Bolsheviks murdered in the revolution's obscene orgy of indiscriminate retributory violence ("Anastasia screamed in vain..."). These idiots, rather than be grateful... Rather than work to help those less well-off... Rather than just, say, work for charity and human emancipation through global poverty reduction (and through free markets)... Or, frankly, rather just work --- toil! --- and make their own damn money and mind their own damned business... They're guilt-ridden and mad.
Remember, it's always the affluent intellectuals who form the "vanguard" of radical movements, waving the red flag at the head of the worldwide proletarian revolution. Che Guevara was trained as a physician. Ho Chi Minh was the son of Confucian scholar and teacher, and after literally traveling the world, he received his political education in Paris, that destitute human hellscape of haute couture, Impressionism, the Guide Michelin, and world-foundational enlightenment philosophy. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Comrade Lenin) actually enjoyed a comfortable petite middle-class status and studied physics and mathematics at Kazan Imperial University, one of the top technical institutes in Russia at the time. He was expelled for "revolutionary activities." Stalin was the son of Besarion Jughashvili, a shoemaker and successful small-business owner who ultimately cracked under pressure and descended into a long drunken vodka vacation. Son Joseph (Joseph Besarionis dzе Jughashvili a.k.a Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin) was a very promising student who attended the Orthodox Spiritual Seminary in Tbilisi, Georgia, on a generous scholarship. He'd been mentored by Father Christopher Charkviani into the Orthodox priest-pipeline, a promising career path to economic stability (if not wealth and prosperity). Mao Zedong, as a child, was raised in a wealthy family in Hunan Province. He attended the First Normal School of Changsha, one of the best educational institutions in regions --- and he then quickly absorbed himself in all kinds of anti-imperialist revolutionary agitprop, naturally. Béla Kun, the leader of the Hungarian Revolution of 1919, received an education at the "upper class" Silvania Főgimnázium (the Silvania National College), a prestigious bilingual high school in Zalău, Romania. It was Béla Kun who, in 1919, led the fight against counterrevolutionary troop units, crushing the incipient counter-rebellion, which resulted in 1,000s of dead and tortured over a two-year period (1919–1921) known as Hungary's "White Terror."
These people are not the product of the capitalist "lumpenproletariat," that most despised and downtrodden class in all of Marxist-Leninist theory.
And so it goes: For America's sheltered Millennial youth of today, as entitled as they are --- because of racism, sexism, microaggressions, homophobia, transphobia, settler colonialism, genocide of indigenous peoples, the "environment," and (of course) Israel --- the solution is the burn it all down in an apocalyptic ideological war against phantom "oppressors."
Gird your loins, people. They're coming after you. Sooner or later, they'll have your name and number (listed in the new regime's social media social credit system database, built in collaboration with the recently nationalized ideological-purity industry firms of Silicon Valley, now elevated under the new Biden politburo as the Big Tech Komsomol Thought Crimes Sanitary Correction Unit). Get ready for Kamala's "Truth and Reconciliation Committee." Wealthy Ivy League and elite private college students will be the party's Red Guards in America's 2020 "Cultural Revolution."
Lately, Sam Jacobs has been having a lot of conversations with his family’s lawyers. He’s trying to gain access to more of his $30 million trust fund. At 25, he’s hit the age when many heirs can blow their money on harebrained businesses or a stable of sports cars. He doesn’t want to do that, but by wealth management standards, his plan is just as bad. He wants to give it all away.
“I want to build a world where someone like me, a young person who controls tens of millions of dollars, is impossible,” he said.
A socialist since college, Mr. Jacobs sees his family’s “extreme, plutocratic wealth” as both a moral and economic failure. He wants to put his inheritance toward ending capitalism, and by that he means using his money to undo systems that accumulate money for those at the top, and that have played a large role in widening economic and racial inequality.
Millennials will be the recipients of the largest generational shift of assets in American history — the Great Wealth Transfer, as finance types call it. Tens of trillions of dollars are expected to pass between generations in just the next decade.
And that money, like all wealth in the United States, is extremely concentrated in the upper brackets. Mr. Jacobs, whose grandfather was a founder of Qualcomm, expects to receive up to $100 million over the course of his lifetime.
Most of his fellow millennials, however, are receiving a rotten inheritance — debt, dim job prospects and a figment of a social safety net. The youngest of them were 15 in 2011 when Occupy Wall Street drew a line between the have-a-lots and everyone else; the oldest, if they were lucky, were working in a post-recession economy even before the current recession. Class and inequality have been part of the political conversation for most of their adult lives.
In their time, the ever-widening gulf between the rich and poor has pushed left-wing politics back into the American political mainstream. President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. trailed Senator Bernie Sanders, the socialist candidate, by 20 points among millennial voters in this year’s Democratic presidential primary. And over the last six years, millennials have taken the Democratic Socialists of America from a fringe organization with an average member age of 60 to a national force with chapters in every state and a membership of nearly 100,000, most of them under 35.
Mr. Jacobs, as both a trust-fund kid and an anticapitalist, is in a rare position among leftists fighting against economic inequality. But he isn’t alone in trying to figure out, as he put it, “what it means to be with the 99 percent, when you’re the 1 percent.”
Challenging the System
“I was always taught that this is just the way the world is, that my family has wealth while others don’t, and that because of that, I need to give some of it away, but not necessarily question why it was there,” said Rachel Gelman, a 30-year-old in Oakland, Calif., who describes her politics as “anticapitalist, anti-imperialist and abolitionist.”
Her family always gave generously to liberal causes and civil society groups. Ms. Gelman supports groups devoted to ending inequality, including the Movement for Black Lives, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and Critical Resistance, a leading prison abolition group.
“My money is mostly stocks, which means it comes from underpaying and undervaluing working-class people, and that’s impossible to disconnect from the economic legacies of Indigenous genocide and slavery,” Ms. Gelman said. “Once I realized that, I couldn’t imagine doing anything with my wealth besides redistribute it to these communities.”
According to the consulting firm Accenture, the Silent Generation and baby boomers will gift their heirs up to $30 trillion by 2030, and up to $75 trillion by 2060. These fortunes began to amass decades ago — in some cases centuries. But the concentration of wealth became stratospheric starting in the 1970s, when neoliberalism became the financial sector’s guiding economic philosophy and companies began to obsessively pursue higher returns for shareholders.
“The wealth millennials are inheriting came from a mammoth redistribution away from the working masses, creating a super-rich tiny minority at the expense of a fleeting American dream that is now out of reach to most people,” said Richard D. Wolff, a Marxist and an emeritus economics professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst who has published 12 books about class and inequality.
He said he has been professionally arguing against capitalism’s selling points since his teaching career began, in 1967, but that his millennial students “are more open to hearing that message than their parents ever were.”
Heirs whose wealth has come from a specific source sometimes use that history to guide their giving. Pierce Delahunt, a 32-year-old “socialist, anarchist, Marxist, communist or all of the above,” has a trust fund that was financed by their former stepfather’s outlet mall empire. (Mx. Delahunt takes nongendered pronouns.)
“When I think about outlet malls, I think about intersectional oppression,” Mx. Delahunt said. There’s the originally Indigenous land each mall was built on, plus the low wages paid to retail and food service workers, who are disproportionately people of color, and the carbon emissions of manufacturing and transporting the goods. With that on their mind, Mx. Delahunt gives away $10,000 a month, divided between 50 small organizations, most of which have an anticapitalist mission and in some way tackle the externalities of discount shopping.
If money is power, then true wealth redistribution also means redistributing authority. Margi Dashevsky, who is 33 and lives in Alaska, gets guidance on her charitable giving from an advisory team of three women activists from Indigenous and Black power movements. “The happenstance of me being born into this wealth doesn’t mean I’m somehow omniscient about how it should be used,” she said. “It actually gives me a lot of blind spots.”
She also donates to social justice funds like Third Wave Fund, where grant-making is guided by the communities receiving funding, instead of being decided by a board of wealthy individuals. The latter sort of nonprofit, Ms. Dashevsky said, “comes from a place of assuming incompetence, putting up all these hurdles for activists and wasting their time on things like impact reporting. I want to flip that on its head by stepping back, trusting and listening.”
Of course, an individual act of wealth redistribution does not, on its own, change a system. But these heirs see themselves as part of a bigger shift, and are dedicated to funding its momentum.
I've been watching a lot of long podcasts, YouTube interviews, and Bloggingheads t.v.
So much great, great stuff out there. Except for football, and streaming shows late at night, I haven't been watching ANY mainstream news programming, and I watch pretty much everything. I'm just sick of it right now.
But Gleen Greenwald's an island of reason in a sea of mental illness.
It was a call that took Diane Keaton by surprise.
Three decades after “Godfather Part III” opened to middling reviews and box office grosses, Francis Ford Coppola returned to the editing bay to tinker with a film that was largely dismissed as a disappointment. Coppola shuffled scenes around, changed music cues, and affixed a new beginning and ending to the three hour epic, now rechristened “Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone.” Now, he was inviting Keaton, along with co-stars Al Pacino, Talia Shire, and George Hamilton to see the finished product at a private screening on the Paramount lot.
“It was one of the best moments of my life to watch it,” says Keaton. “To me it was a dream come true. I saw the movie in a completely different light. When I saw it way back, it was like ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ It didn’t seem to do that well and the reviews weren’t great. But Francis restructured the beginning and the end and man, I’m telling you it worked.”
It wasn’t just critics and audiences who were cool to “The Godfather Part III” when it opened in 1990. Keaton was one of the people who found the initial film lacking.
“I don’t know why people didn’t appreciate it, but I was one of them,” she admits. “What was wrong with me? Why didn’t I like this before? But I didn’t. I kind of just dismissed it and thought, ‘oh well.'”
She’s convinced that Coppola’s re-edit will make people reconsider the film, as well as one of its most maligned elements, Sofia Coppola’s performance as Michael Corleone’s daughter, Mary. The knives were out for Sofia Coppola when the movie premiered. She had barely any acting experience when she stepped in for an ailing Winona Ryder just prior to shooting, and reviewers excoriated her performance, calling it flat, amateurish and unconvincing.
“That’s not going to happen anymore,” Keaton says, arguing the new edit gives Sofia Coppola’s performance more of a chance to shine. “She’s what a daughter would be like if you had this guy as your dad, the head of a criminal organization. She was not so sure of herself and is kind of quiet. Kind of haunted. I thought she was fantastic.”
Keaton said re-watching the film reminded her of the fun she had during its production.
“It took me back,” says Keaton “At that time, I was kind of with Al. I really liked [co-star] Andy Garcia. We were shooting in Italy. It was a special time.”
The actress was even able to put aside her long-standing aversion to watching herself on screen...
I have agreed to participate in a "How to Be an Anti-Racist Book Discussion" on my campus (an event based on the currently "all-the-rage" book by Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist).
Here are the discussion points for the participants for the book discussion, which is to be held on Zoom:
* What did you learn from the book that will help set you on a path to be an antiracist educator? * In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi shares his own experience with racist thinking. How does his honesty help give us space to acknowledge and name our own racist behaviors and attitudes?* Kendi writes, “The only way to undo racism is to constantly identify it and describe it—and then dismantle it.” Why does he believe we need to call out racism when we see it, even if it can be uncomfortable to identify?* The book’s central message is that the opposite of “racist” isn’t “not racist.” The true opposite of “racist” is antiracist. “The good news,” Kendi writes, “is that racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. We can be racist one minute and an antiracist the next.” What does it mean to have to constantly reaffirm your identity as an antiracist? Is there any benefit to the fact that you can’t just decide you are “not racist” or an antiracist and be done with it?
* What is the first step you, personally, will take in striving to be an antiracist? How will you check yourself and hold yourself accountable if you notice you, or someone else, is being racist?* Anyone who values immigrants from European countries and devalues immigrants from Latin America is guilty of racism. Have you ever been guilty of this type of racism? Discuss the unique resilience and resourcefulness people possess if they leave everything in their native country behind and immigrate to another, as Kendi examines in the chapter on Ethnicity. * Identify two practices at the course level which present roadblocks and contribute to systemic racism.* Identify two practices at the department level which present roadblocks and contribute to systemic racism.* Identify two practices at the institutional level which present roadblocks and contribute to systemic racism.* Why do you think it is so hard for people to not assess other cultures from their own cultural standards? How does doing this trap people in racist ideas?
And I gotta say it: Don't get mad a me, bro.
I know there's a huge push on the right to actually shut down thinking, and, in a few cases, to actually completely embrace and evangelize the most wild claims and conspiracies against the radical left and the Democrats (but I repeat myself). At some point, you have to draw a line on how far you'll go to demonize and destroy the other side -- and to defend yourself against the other side. I'm a good person. I want to make things better: "Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, then dwell on these things" (Philippians 4:8).
But being good as I am means I will also defend myself. And to the death. And once again, lately, I'm defending myself against a lot of ideological hatred, obsessive leftist anti-conservative and anti-religious bias, and the once-again leftist condescension and hubris on social media that is even stronger than usual when a leftist Democrat "wins" the White House. Back in 2016, Facebook comments and posts I wrote after the election were reported to my college, and the same trolls have come back out of the woodwork this time around, now that I decided to give Facebook another try (for the new era, same as the old era, alas). But nah. Leftist are not driving me off the site this time. I'm sick and tired of their attacks. Defend against the left's hate. Defend against the left's destruction. Defend against the left's lies: "Again, the devil took Him to a very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and said to Him, 'All these things I will give you if you will worship me.' Then Jesus said, "Go, Satan! For it is written, 'You shall worship the Lord your God, and serve Him only'" (Matthew 4:8-10).
The left has abandoned the Lord and is doing the work of Satan. There's no other way, as a Christian, to understand this, and thus we must gather strength in faith and gird for the battles ahead.
So I'm defending myself. I'm holding the line for truth and facts. I mean, ask yourself: Do leftists say and advocate things that have any basis in factual reality (for example, L.A. County's latest total restaurant lockdown is entirely devoid of any basis in scientific fact)? Nah. But frankly, if I'm going to remain employed at my college, then I've (somewhat) got to go along to get along. I've got to at least be professional and collegiate, and it's hard. Longtime readers will know that I've been fighting a ten-year war against radical leftist harassment, cancelling, and multiple attempts to get me fired. And I've been fighting against a college administration that rarely, if ever, gives me the benefit of the doubt, one that in the past has investigated the most absurd claims by anonymous trolls who tagged me and my college in the same tweets (this was after I got a lot of viral coverage for my on-the-ground reporting of the ANSWER/HAMAS protest against Israel, for example, "Communists, Hamas Solidarity Protesters Demand Israel's Extermination in Los Angeles — #ANSWERLA"). It was me who was investigated. I mean,fuck! Trolls had gotten the home phone number of the vice president of academic affairs at my school. They harassed him. They claimed I was "stalking" Cassandra Fairbanks, the erstwhile militant SoCal leftist who volte-face went all Cernovich or something shortly before Trump was elected. Now she's the doyenne of the Gateway Pundit set in D.C. (Weird, I know.) In any case, I had my administration threatening me to get this trolling "stopped," even though I literally had nothing to do with these completely anonymous randos working their evil to make things bad for me. I KNOW WHAT EVIL LEFTISTS DO. Seriously. I had an attorney at one point, and I now have an accommodation with the college on my "private First Amendment activities," as my human resources department labeled my blogging and tweeting at the time.
Therefore sometimes I have to just roll my eyes at folks, on either side, who literally can't entertain an idea that contradicts their political ideology and positions. I blame the left most of all. But I see conservatives copying the left when they engage in the exact same kinds of speech suppression campaigns. (Wayne Dupree? C'mon.) It's out of control, and an honest person should and will call it out, from wherever it may come. (And one more time, it comes overwhelming from the left.)
So, yeah, I'm actually reading Kendi's book, with an open mind, for the college's Zoom book discussion, I'm gonna calling be myself an "anti-antiracist" lol.
And with that, here's Glenn Loury and John McWhorter at the Bloggingheads video. McWorther name-drops Coleman Hughes, at City Journal, "How to Be an Anti-Intellectual," and Kelefa Sanneh, at the New Yorker, "The Fight to Redefine Racism."
Well, for one, she's Australian, and shes shared a photo of herself wearing an American flag bikini, and, as she's apparently a Biden supporter, her Trump-back fans weren't pleased.
Stanley's the bestsellng author of How Propaganda Worksand How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. I haven't read his work, mainly because I'm constantly reading REAL experts of fascism and Nazi Germany, which is one of my research and teaching specialties in international relations and comparative politics. In short, Jason Stanely doesn't rate except as a bloviating academic nincompoop who's recently made some of the "hawt" progressive book lists and who's been feted endlessly at the New York Times for his conformity to current left-wing trends in illiberalism and ideological projection.
Gawd these people are idiots.
I don’t know who needs to hear it, but Angela Davis is one of the most impactful US intellectuals of the last half century. Watching the intellectual midgets and half-wits yell “communism!” at her, as they did at Du Bois, is beyond cringeworthy.
And I wrote: "Dude, you teach history wtf?!! She literally the ran on the Communist Party U.S.A.’s presidential ticket in 1980 and 1984. She’s in fact exactly a “communist”."
The papers of Angela Davis, just acquired by Harvard, trace her transformation from an obscure philosophy professor to an icon of the global left https://t.co/YpAetgW11H
In 2006, Proposition 209 passed 55 percent to 45 percent (a 10-point) margin. It banned racial preferences in the state.
In 2020, Proposition 16, which would have restored affirmative action in California, was defeated 57 percent to 43 percent (a 14-point margin).
In 1990, ethnic whites were 60 percent of the state's population. In 2020, ethnic whites are 40 percent of the population. Hispanics now comprise more than 40 percent of the state's population, and we have a "majority-minority" demographic.
And Democrats still couldn't get race quotas approved by the voters? Maybe the problem's the Democrat Party and not the voters. Even in the bluest of states, race-neutral public policies command huge support. I mean Proposition 20, the left's "defund the police" and "abolish prisons" initiative was shot down by a whopping 62 percent to 38 percent, a 24-point margin).
So, racial justice reform in California isn't going anywhere for now. Good thing, sheesh.
Widespread skepticism in Latino and Asian communities and tepid support among younger Black residents combined with opposition from most whites to doom the effort this year to revive affirmative action in California, according to a new postelection survey.
The failure of Proposition 16, which voters rejected by 57% to 43%, marked a significant defeat for the state’s Democratic political leadership and many activist groups, which backed the Legislature’s move to put the proposal on this year’s ballot.
The findings of the survey provide the clearest evidence so far of the disconnect between those political leaders and many of their ostensible followers on an issue that has been a touchstone in the state’s political debates for years.
The survey, conducted by a coalition of community organizations, shows widespread support across racial and ethnic lines for diversity in education, public employment and contracting. At the same time, it showed broad skepticism about allowing government officials to use race, ethnicity or gender in making decisions.
On two other topics, the survey showed how attitudes toward the COVID-19 pandemic have grown more politically divided as the state heads into a period of renewed restrictions designed to limit the spread of the disease.
And it indicated that awareness and concern about racial and ethnic discrimination in the state has receded since reaching a high point this summer.
Asked how often they personally felt discriminated against because of their race or ethnicity, about one-third of Latino respondents said they experienced discrimination “frequently” or “sometimes.” That’s down from nearly half when the poll asked the same question in July.
The finding “reaffirms that these issues are difficult and complicated, and people just don’t have the bandwidth” to focus constantly on discrimination, especially when the impact of COVID dominates so many peoples’ lives, said Helen Torres, executive director of Hispanas Organized for Political Equality (HOPE), one of the sponsors of the survey.
“It’s hard to sustain for the long term,” she said.
The share of Asian and Pacific Islander respondents who reported feeling discriminated against showed a similar decline since July. The share of Black respondents who reported feeling discriminated against did not significantly decline.
The California Community Poll, conducted online Nov. 4-15, was designed to provide a more detailed view of the state’s racial and ethnic diversity than is typically possible. It surveyed 1,300 adult California citizens, with over-samples of Black, Latino and Asian Pacific Islander respondents in order to ensure enough in each group to allow analysis by age, gender and other characteristics.
The margin of error is estimated at 2.7 percentage points for the full sample. The poll is sponsored by three community organizations — the Center for Asian Americans United for Self Empowerment (CAUSE), the Los Angeles Urban League and HOPE.
California banned most government affirmative action programs nearly a quarter century ago, in 1996, when voters approved Proposition 209. Since then, overturning the ban has been a major goal for many Democratic lawmakers and state officials, especially at the University of California, where deans and chancellors have repeatedly said that their inability to take race into account in admissions has kept the number of Latino and Black students well below their share of high school graduates who meet UC eligibility standards.
But as the poll showed, many Californians have more mixed feelings on the subject than their elected officials do.
The results show “a limit on California’s liberalism” that “requires some examination of the progressive base,” said Drew Lieberman, senior vice president of Strategies 360, the polling firm that conducted the survey.
Two-thirds of the California adults surveyed said they believe “diverse representation based on race, gender, ethnicity and national origin” is important, with about 4 in 10 calling it “very important.”
That’s true across major ethnic and racial groups and among both voters and nonvoters, the survey found. About 6 in 10 white respondents said they considered diversity important, along with about 7 in 10 who identify as Latino or Asian or Pacific Islanders. Among Black respondents, the share rose to more than 8 in 10.
But that didn’t translate into support for affirmative action. Among Latino respondents, for example, only 30% said Proposition 16 was a good idea, compared with 41% who called it a bad idea and 29% who said they were unsure. The division was similar among Asian and Pacific Islander respondents, with 35% calling the proposition a good idea, 46% saying it was a bad idea and 20% unsure.
White respondents were slightly more opposed, with 32% calling the measure a good idea, 53% a bad idea and 15% unsure.
Only among Black respondents did the proposition get majority support, with 56% calling it a good idea, 19% a bad idea and 25% unsure.
The views of voters and nonvoters were very similar, suggesting that higher turnout would probably not have changed the results.
Roughly a third of those polled could be characterized as solid supporters of affirmative action — people who said that diversity is important and the ballot measure was a good idea. On the other side, just over 1 in 5 say diversity is not important to them and that the ballot measure was a bad idea.
Another 1 in 5 say diversity is important but that the proposal was a bad idea. The members of that swing group are more likely than others to describe themselves as moderates and to be suburbanites.
Since the election, some supporters of the ballot measure have speculated that voters may have been confused about its potential impact. The survey does not support that. After asking people their opinion, the survey gave a more extensive description of the ballot measure and retested people’s feelings on it. The additional information did not significantly change people’s views.
Everyone --- and I mean, amazingly, everyone --- is outraged by this video.
Leftist government politicians the world over are saying the lad had it coming, of course. But the rest of us see the curtain of "compassionate" progressivism coming down.
They kicked him out of the pub for being "too loud." Right. So he climbed the fence, strolled back in to join his friends, and poured himself another. Then gurgle, gurgle whack!
Well, despite corona, it's a bountiful holiday season, dang!I love Ms. Lindsey!
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I've never heard of this lady until today, but I can see why she's a sensation. Watch: "I'M BACK -belle delphine."
She's a 21-year-old South African-born British fashion model, social media celebrity (influencer), and banned YouTuber with an "Only Fans" nude page. She's also posted nude videos to Porn Hub.
Insisting on the prevalence of ‘systemic racism’ is a way of defending a victim-focused racial identity. But blacks today are far more likely to encounter racial preferences than racial discrimination, writes Shelby Steele. https://t.co/zg7k3WbJBc
Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina gave a remarkable speech at this year’s Republican National Convention. Yes, here was a black man at a GOP event, so there was a whiff of identity politics. When we see color these days, we expect ideology to follow. But Mr. Scott’s charisma that night was simply that he spoke as a person, not a spokesperson for his color.
Burgess Owens, Herschel Walker, Daniel Cameron and several others did the same. It was a parade of individuals. And in their speeches the human being stepped out from behind the identity, telling personal stories that reached for human connections with the American people—this rather than the usual posturing for leverage with tales of grievance. So they were all fresh and compelling.
Do these Republicans foretell a new racial order in America? Clearly they have pushed their way through an old racial order, as have—it could be argued—many black Trump voters in the recent election. I believe there is in fact a new racial order slowly and tenuously emerging, and that we blacks are swimming through rough seas to reach it. But to better see the new, it is necessary to know the old.
The old began in what might be called America’s Great Confession. In passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, America effectively confessed to a long and terrible collusion with the evil of racism. (President Kennedy was the first president to acknowledge that civil rights was a “moral issue.”) This triggered nothing less than a crisis of moral authority that threatened the very legitimacy of American democracy.
Even today, almost 60 years beyond the Civil Rights Act, groups like Black Lives Matter, along with a vast grievance industry, use America’s insecure moral authority around race as an opportunity to assert themselves. Doesn’t BLM dwell in a space made for it by America’s racial self-doubt?
In the culture, whites and American institutions are effectively mandated by this confession to prove their innocence of racism as a condition of moral legitimacy. Blacks, in turn, are mandated to honor their new freedom by developing into educational and economic parity with whites. If whites achieve racial innocence and blacks develop into parity with whites, then America will have overcome its original sin. Democracy will have become manifest.
This was America’s post-confession bargain between the races—innocence on the white hand, development on the black. It defined the old order with which those convention speakers seemed to break. But there is a problem with these mandates: To achieve their ends, they both need blacks to be victims. Whites need blacks they can save to prove their innocence of racism. Blacks must put themselves forward as victims the better to make their case for entitlements.
This is a corruption because it makes black suffering into a moral power to be wielded, rather than a condition to be overcome. This is the power that blacks discovered in the ’60s. It gained us a War on Poverty, affirmative action, school busing, public housing and so on. But it also seduced us into turning our identity into a virtual cult of victimization—as if our persecution was our eternal flame, the deepest truth of who we are, a tragic fate we trade on. After all, in an indifferent world, it may feel better to be the victim of a great historical injustice than a person left out of history when that injustice recedes.
Yet there is an elephant in the room. It is simply that we blacks aren’t much victimized any more. Today we are free to build a life that won’t be stunted by racial persecution. Today we are far more likely to encounter racial preferences than racial discrimination. Moreover, we live in a society that generally shows us goodwill—a society that has isolated racism as its most unforgivable sin.
This lack of victimization amounts to an “absence of malice” that profoundly threatens the victim-focused black identity. Who are we without the malice of racism? Can we be black without being victims? The great diminishment (not eradication) of racism since the ’60s means that our victim-focused identity has become an anachronism. Well suited for the past, it strains for relevance in the present.
Thus, for many blacks today—especially the young—there is a feeling of inauthenticity, that one is only thinly black because one isn’t racially persecuted. “Systemic racism” is a term that tries to recover authenticity for a less and less convincing black identity. This racism is really more compensatory than systemic. It was invented to make up for the increasing absence of the real thing.
Liberals have a very different idea about why President Trump was elected in 2016. Writing in Foreign Policy recently, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argued that “Trump built his political brand … by encouraging many Republican voters to see themselves as belonging to a shrinking white majority that can only maintain control of the commanding heights by undemocratic means.”
These nitwits and others in the smug intelligentsia who so despise Trump and the people who voted for him do not understand that millions of Americans love their country, and want a president who shares that enthusiasm. When Obama declared in 2008 that small-town Midwesterners “get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them … as a way to explain their frustrations," it wasn’t a “slip”; that’s how he feels.
Tens of millions of Americans have lost faith in our institutions, our media and now in our elections. After months of Democrats rewriting the voting rules, extending deadlines and pushing mail-in voting, only 44% of Republicans, a month before the election, thought the ballots would be “accurately cast and counted nationwide,” a record low.
Those doubts are now fueling uncertainty about the election outcome – uncertainty encouraged by President Trump. Unhappily, there appear to be enough instances of vote irregularities to feed suspicions, but not enough to overturn the results.
Trump supporters will want the president to be their voice going forward. Whether he chooses to run again in 2024, or whether he is content to be a senior party influencer, Trump is not going away.
It's Christopher Rufo, at the American Conservative:
"@realchrisrufo examines what life is like in Youngstown, Ohio; Memphis, Tennessee; and Stockton, California. All three cities have distinctly different histories, and yet the collapse of each has resulted in a nearly identical reality on the ground." https://t.co/pM3j6lQefV
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.
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...
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.)
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.
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.
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...
--- 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.
Tommy Robinson News, Nov 21 Towns and cities across the country now rising up against the Coronavirus lockdown measures, this was basildon today. pic.twitter.com/JPHQLpoKMU
— TROLL HUNTER AKA Katie Hopkins.✊🏼🤫😉 (@BrettEverest) November 21, 2020
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.'
