Enjoy comedian Bill Burr’s pungent take on ABC burying the Epstein story. Very little new information, but a good articulation of the outrage most of the nation feels over the story, at perhaps a slightly higher level of profanity.
“Oh you mean the part where you had evidence of these f*cking super rich people banging kids, that’s a private moment of frustration, and it all goes away?”
Like the garbage French elite of long ago, our American garbage elite of today has learned nothing and forgotten nothing. For four years, it has been focused entirely on deep sixing Donald Trump for his unforgivable crime of demanding that our ruling caste be held accountable for its legacy of failure. Instead of focusing on not being terrible at their job of running America’s institutions, our elitists have decided that the real problem is us Normals being angry about how they are terrible at their job of running America’s institutions. So, let’s imagine that they finally vanquish Trump, though every time they come up against him they end up dragging themselves home like Ned Beatty after a particularly tough canoe trip.
What happens then?
What happens then is that it’s back to business as usual, and for decades, business as usual for our garbage elite has not merely been running our institutions badly but pillaging and looting our country for power, prestige and cash.
The difference is that in the future they will be much more careful to ensure that no one who is not in on the scam will ever again come anywhere near the levers of power. You can already see it – the demands that we defer to the bureaucrats they own, the attacks on the idea of free expression, and the campaign to disarm us. Their objective is no more Trumps, just an endless line of progressive would-be Maduros with the march toward despair occasionally put on pause for a term by some Fredocon Republican who hates us Normals just as much as the Dems, but won’t admit it until after he’s out of office.
So #NeverTrumpers are upset because Trump called them scum? Well boo freaking hoo:
If you were involved in the 2016 election and, at any point, decided that Hillary Clinton was very bad for the nation and that Evan McMullin was a f***ing bug-eating tool and that Donald Trump was not Beelzebub incarnate, then you became the target of abuse. In my personal experience, there are people who I’d considered friends for several years who I would no longer pee on if they were on fire today because of the abuse and scorn the heaped upon people who disagreed with them and the cheap bullying that they engaged in. Trumpkin. Trumptard. Trumpaloo. Trumphumper. And all manner of other cute names.
Snip.
For three years these people have degraded, demeaned, and libeled anyone who simply decided that, for all his flaws, Trump was better than any Democrat. No grace was offered to people who had considered them friends and colleagues. No common cause was allowed to be made. They stopped being conservatives and Republicans who simply disliked the candidate and then the president and became active Democrat partisans who simply called themselves something else. Every hoax and bad faith allegation made against the President and his administration, from the Russia bullsh** to defending illegal FISA warrants to the “Muslim ban” to “kids in cages,” was spearheaded by NeverTrumpers flagellating themselves with their principles and yodeling “we’re better than that.”
In 2020, these people have a choice to make. They can either earn their way back in–Prodigal Son, and all that–or they can stay gone. I don’t care who they vote for because Trump won last time without them and he’s in a much stronger position today than he was in November 2016. But, no matter what path they choose, there should be no forgetting of how these people have acted and what they’ve done. No one should allow them to forget why no one–right or left–wishes to have anything to do with them. No one should ever forget that they are dangerous, timorous and unfaithful allies and should not be allowed to do any more than hold the coats for the rest of us.
President Donald Trump begins process to formally withdraw from the Paris climate accord. I’m not sure this is strictly necessary, as it was never binding on the U.S. because it was never submitted to the senate for ratification. As opposed to being nonbinding on the rest of the world because they’re just lying about following it anyway.
Sanctions against Iran really biting into its oil revenues, especially as the U.S. becomes more sophisticated about counter attempts to evade it.
As recently as mid-2019, Iranian leaders openly boasted of selling its oil to foreign customers despite the 2017 sanctions. At the time of that boast, Iran was getting a million BPD (barrels per day) out to export customers. In contrast, before the sanctions, Iran exported two million BPD. But by July 2019 exports had been reduced to 365,000 BPD and in August it was a record low 160,000 BPD and that did not change much in September. What the Iranians don’t issue press releases about is how well sanction enforcement efforts have been at reducing those illegal exports to record lows.
The UK is finally having a general election after essentially a year of deadlock. If history is any guide, parties promising to deliver Brexit will win, then not deliver Brexit…
Related: Sanctuary city proposition goes down in flames in Tucson. Funny how not enforcing laws against illegal aliens enjoys crushing defeat when actual voters get a chance to chime in.
Meanwhile, the illegal alien debate in the Democratic Party is between the hard left and the loony left. “While the rest of America frets about illegal alien criminals escaping authorities with the eager help of liberal politicians, liberals are more concerned about proving to each other how wonderful and tolerant they are by opening the border and allowing anyone and everyone with a sob story to be welcomed and cared for.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
A recent string of high-profile comments brought “Cancel Culture” to the fore. Stand-up routines by Dave Chappelle, Bill Burr and Sebastian Maniscalo forced the subject back into the limelight.
“No Safe Spaces,” a documentary about the Left’s serial attacks on free expression, debuts this weekend at the near-perfect time. Comedian Adam Carolla and syndicated radio star Dennis Prager unite to explore how universities are clamping down on healthy debate, and why that woke sentiment is leaking into society at large.
“Joker” director Todd Phillips, who previously helmed the “Hangover” series, amplified the cause. He told Vanity Fair he created “Joker” because making comedies is no longer fun.
“Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture,” he says. “There were articles written about why comedies don’t work anymore—I’ll tell you why, because all the f***ing funny guys are like, ‘F*** this s***, because I don’t want to offend you.’
Science Fiction tries to erase its past over crimes against Social Justice Warrior orthodoxy. To be fair, the people who handed out the (now being renamed) James Tiptree Award were always far-left radical feminist lunatics. The question is why have the theoretically more sober people behind the John W. Campbell and World Fantasy Awards also given in to this Orwellian, history-erasing lunacy?
Is anyone really surprised when a progressive treats institutional charity money as a personal slush fund?
The former head of the L.A.-based anti-poverty nonprofit Youth Policy Institute improperly used the organization’s funds to pay the property taxes on his house, buy furniture for his home office and make national political donations, the group alleged in court documents filed this week.
Dixon Slingerland, who was fired as the group’s chief executive in September, spent the nonprofit’s money on an array of unauthorized and personal expenses, including private tutoring for his children, contributions to his wife’s pension, and “lavish” dining, travel and entertainment, according to a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing lodged by the nonprofit in federal court.
Texas candidate Jessica Cisneros has been one of the most high profile candidates backed by Justice Democrats, the liberal group seeking to defeat incumbents they perceive as insufficiently progressive. While Cisneros has received praise from freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.), local residents appear more skeptical. She has received just $3,585 of her $190,000 (1.8 percent) in itemized contributions from inside the San Antonio district she hopes to represent.
Cisneros is primarying Democratic incumbent Henry Cueller for the Texas 28th Congressional District. She does not appear to be former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros’ daughter.
“Democrat Elizabeth “Eliz” Markowitz and Republican Gary Gates are headed to a runoff to decide who will fill the unexpired term of State Rep. John Zerwas (R–Richmond)” for Texas House District 28. Gates is a seven time loser, the founding money behind the “Texas Citizens Coalition” (whose mailers I have not seen recently), and was last seen running a dishonest campaign against Wayne Christian for the Railroad Commission. Still, I can only imagine that he’ll be preferable to a Democrat, and even though Markowitz garnered more votes in the election, all the other candidates were Republicans for a Republican-leaning seat, giving Gates a good chance to retain it.
“Plastikov 3D printed AK. 900 rounds on the front receiver, 550 on the rear – with no signs of damage. 7.62×39 goodness in a 7 dollar PLA receiver.” Not quite a revolution, since he used metal parts for the ejector and rails, and spent a total of $393 for all the parts, but definitely interesting, since the receiver is what the federal government counts as the “gun.” Caveat: 7.62x39mm evidently generates lower firing pressure than 5.56 NATO. But I’m hardly an expert here. Still: interesting. (Hat tip: Sal the Agorist.)
Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! I thought fall started tomorrow, but various reference sources say the fall equinox doesn’t actually occur until Monday, September 23.
What happens when a political party is hijacked by fanatics, ideologues, and hysterics who don’t care whether they win or lose an election?
They lose elections.
That’s where the Democrats are headed because they’d rather be “right” than clever. And when it comes to the issue of race, Democrats think they have a corner on “right.”
They’ve got a small problem, though. In order to appeal to the fanatics, ideologues, and hysterics to tap them for money and support, they have to at least give lip service to their warped views on race. And that includes calling you and me and about 70 percent of the American voters “racist.”
Not only did Christine Blasey Ford’s key witness and friend — Leland Keyser — state that she didn’t recall the party where Ford claimed she was assaulted, she also says she doesn’t remember “any others like it.”
Her words were strong: “It would be impossible for me to be the only girl at a get-together with three guys, have her leave, and then not figure out how she’s getting home,” she said. “I just really didn’t have confidence in the story.”
Even more, Pogrebin and Kelly uncovered a pressure campaign to get Keyser to alter her testimony, to back Ford. Keyser told the writers, “I was told behind the scenes that certain things could spread about me if I didn’t comply,” and they report on group texts containing ominous language about Keyser’s allegedly “f***ed up” life.
While the reaction to the allegations against Kavanaugh was almost uniformly partisan (Republicans rejected the claims; Democrats either believed them or thought they cast enough doubt on Kavanaugh to deny him the nomination), there is — in fact — a truth of the matter here. Kavanaugh did or did not assault Ford, and in any fair proceeding Keyser’s testimony would detonate like a bomb. Remember, this wasFord’s witness and friend. She’s a Democrat. And, moreover, there was now evidence of a pressure campaign that looked a lot like an attempt to suborn perjury.
Pogrebin is at the center of a discussion of gross journalistic malpractice after publishing a story Saturday night with colleague Kate Kelly that failed to mention that a woman who, according to a man named Max Stier, had Kavanaugh’s penis pressed into her hand at a campus party by multiple friends of his has said she recalls no such incident. That woman has also declined to talk about the matter with reporters or officials. Why even publish Stier’s claim, which was discounted by Washington Post reporters who heard about it a year ago, that he witnessed such an incident during a Yale party in the 1980s? Because of the narrative, Pogrebin says. “We decided to go with it because obviously it is of a piece with a kind of behavior,” she said on WMAL. Pure confirmation bias.
Though the woman at the center of the story wants no part of it, Kelly and Pogrebin published her name anyway (in their book, albeit not in the Times). “You’re kind of directing attention at a victim and she’s gonna be besieged,” Pogrebin said on the radio show, in explaining why the Times piece left the name out. “Even if people can ultimately find her name, it’s not necessarily important to make it easier for them to do so.” Oh, so publishing her name in a book does not constitute making it too easy for people to find this private citizen? It’s a separate but serious scandal. This woman has been made a public figure in a national story without her consent. Even if she were the victim of sexual misconduct, the Times would ordinarily take steps to protect her identity. Yet she has made no claim along these lines, and Pogrebin and Kelly outed her anyway. Is there no respect for a woman’s privacy? Is every woman in America to think of herself as potential collateral damage should she ever cross paths with any Republican whom Times reporters later tried to take down?
In her WMAL interview this morning, Pogrebin repeatedly refers to the woman as a “victim.” This word choice is instructive about Pogrebin’s thought process. Calling her a victim would be begging the question if the woman claimed this status for herself. She would then be only an alleged victim. But she isn’t even that. She has made no claim to be a victim, yet Pogrebin describes her as one anyway. This is a case of a reporter overriding her reporting with her opinion. Pogrebin then impugns the woman by saying she was so drunk that her memory can’t be trusted. She also says that “everyone” at the party was massively drunk and that their memories are therefore unreliable.
Does she hear herself talking? If this is true, it means Max Stier was also drunk and his memories also can’t be trusted. (Someone should ask Pogrebin whether she was present at this party about which she knows so much.) By what journalistic standard does a reporter discount what is said by the person with the most direct and relevant experience of a matter — the woman in question at the Yale party — in favor of a drunken bystander? If both the woman and Stier were drunk, why is his memory more credible than hers? If something like this had actually happened to her, wouldn’t she be more likely than anyone else to remember it? Maybe Stier is remembering a different party. Maybe he’s remembering a different guy. Maybe he made it up.
A new America supposedly is marching forward under the banner of ending fossil fuels, curbing the Second Amendment, redistributing income, promoting identity politics and open borders, and providing free college, free health care and abortion on demand.
An insomniac Trump fights all of the above nonstop and everywhere. In the past, Republican presidents sought to slow the progressive transformation of America but despaired of ever stopping it.
No slugfest is too off-topic or trivial for Trump. Sometimes that means calling out former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick for persuading NFL stars to kneel during the national anthem. Huge, monopolistic Silicon Valley companies are special Trump targets. Sometimes Trump enters cul-de-sac Twitter wars with Hollywood has-beens who have attacked him and his policies.
Trump variously goes after antifa, political correctness on campus, the NATO hierarchy, the radical green movement, Planned Parenthood, American universities and, above all, the media — especially CNN, the Washington Post and the New York Times.
For all the acrimony and chaos — and prognostications of Trump’s certain failure — a bloodied Trump wins more than he loses. NATO members may hate Trump, but more are finally paying their promised defense contributions.
In retrospect, many Americans concede that the Iran Deal was flawed and that the Paris climate accord mere virtue signaling. China was long due for a reckoning.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation proved fruitless and was further diminished by Mueller’s bizarrely incoherent congressional testimony.
Some of the most prominent Trump haters — Michael Avenatti, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Antony Scaramucci and Rep. Adam Schiff — either have been discredited or have become increasingly irrelevant.
Trump has so enraged his Democratic adversaries that the candidates to replace him have moved further to the left than any primary field in memory. They loathe Trump, but in their abject hatred he has goaded the various Democratic candidates into revealing their support for the crazy Green New Deal, reparations for slavery, relaxed immigration policies and trillions of dollars in new free stuff.
In a way, the left-wing Democratic presidential candidates understand Trump best. If he wins his one-man crusade to stop the progressive project, they are finished, and their own party will make the necessary adjustments and then sheepishly drift back toward the center.
Democratic megadonor Ed Buck finally arrested after overdosing a third black man. This one, unlike the previous two, survived. He’s also been charged with running a meth ring.
So evidently TWO dead black men is the absolute limit for rich gay white Democratic Party donors to get away with before attracting the attention of California law enforcement! THREE times is just one too many!
JFK, even Clancy Wiggums would have slapped the cuffs after death #2
The real issue is far older and more important than whether 52 percent of Britain finally became understandably aggrieved by the increasingly anti-democratic and German-controlled European Union.
England is an island. Historically, politically and linguistically, it was never permanently or fully integrated into European culture and traditions.
The story of Britain has mostly been about conflict with France, Germany or Spain. The preeminence of the Royal Navy, in the defiant spirit of its sea lords, ensured that European dictators from Napoleon to Hitler could never set foot on British soil. As British admiral John Jervis reassured his superiors in 1801 amidst rumors of an impending Napoleonic invasion, “I do not say, my lords, that the French will not come. I say only they will not come by sea.”
Britain’s sea power, imperialism, parliamentary government and majority Protestant religion set it apart from its European neighbors — and not just because of its geographical isolation.
The 18th century British and Scottish Enlightenment of Edmund Burke, David Hume, John Locke and Adam Smith emphasized individualism, freedom and liberty far more than the government-enforced equality of result that was favored by French Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is no accident that the American Revolution was founded on the idea of individual freedom and liberty, unlike the later French Revolution’s violent effort to redistribute income and deprive “enemies of the people” of their rights and even their lives.
Hillary Clinton blames her 2016 presidential defeat on “voter suppression.” Which is a weird way to say “refusing to campaign in the Midwest.”
Poll of Palestinian opinions. I’m sure many will point out the 37-50% (depending on the question) who support war against Israel. I’m more interested in the 48% who believe in possession by djinn or demons. (To be fair, the percentage in America would probably be similar in 1973…)
Israel’s election is still up in the air. The liberalish Blue and White faction appears to have edged Likud 33 to 31, but 61 votes are required to form a government. Current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says he has 55 votes to form a coalition government with orthodox religious parties that Blue and White vows not to join a coalition with.
Although meat has been a central component of the diet of our lineage for millions of years, some nutrition authorities—who often have close connections to animal rights activists or other forms of ideological vegetarianism, such as Seventh-Day Adventism (Banta et al., 2018 Banta, J. E., J. W. Lee, G. Hodgkin, Z. Yi, A. Fanica, and J. Sabate. 2018. The global influence of the Seventh-day Adventist Church on diet. Religions 9 (9):251. doi: 10.3390/rel9090251.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar])—are promoting the view that meat causes a host of health problems and has no redeeming value. We contend that a large part of the case against meat is based on cherry-picked evidence and low-quality observational studies. The bald claim that red meat is an “unhealthy food” (Willett et al., 2019 Willett, Walter, Johan Rockström, Brent Loken, Marco Springmann, Tim Lang, Sonja Vermeulen, Tara Garnett, David Tilman, Fabrice DeClerck, Amanda Wood., et al. 2019. Food in the anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Lancet 393 (10170):447–92. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) is wildly unsupported.
Based on misrepresentations of the state of the science, some organizations are attempting to influence policy makers to take action to reduce meat consumption. Simplification of complex science increases persuasive power but may also serve ideological purposes and lead to scientistic approaches. According to Mayes and Thompson (2015 Mayes, C. R., and D. B. Thompson. 2015. What should we eat? biopolitics, ethics, and nutritional scientism. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 12 (4):587–99. doi: 10.1007/s11673-015-9670-4.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), manifestations of nutritional scientism in the context of biopolitics can have various ethical implications for “individual responsibility and freedom, concerning iatrogenic harm, and for well-being”. Well-meaning yet overemphasized and premature recommendations may eventually cause more damage than benefit, not only physiologically but also by unjustifiably holding individuals accountable for their health outcomes. We believe that a large reduction in meat consumption, such as has been advocated by the EAT-Lancet Commission (Willett et al., 2019 Willett, Walter, Johan Rockström, Brent Loken, Marco Springmann, Tim Lang, Sonja Vermeulen, Tara Garnett, David Tilman, Fabrice DeClerck, Amanda Wood., et al. 2019. Food in the anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Lancet 393 (10170):447–92. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31788-4.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), could produce serious harm. Meat has long been, and continues to be, a primary source of high-quality nutrition. The theory that it can be replaced with legumes and supplements is mere speculation. While diets high in meat have proved successful over the long history of our species, the benefits of vegetarian diets are far from being established, and its dangers have been largely ignored by those who have endorsed it prematurely on the basis of questionable evidence.
Heh: I seem to have my own Fark logo now: . Fark used to be more-or-less balanced between left and right posters, but that went away several years ago (long before Trump), and now it’s overwhelmingly left-wing trolling. Every time the Clown Car update gets linked, there’s a tsunami of hate posting, “your blog sucks,” accusations of paying off admins, etc. Honestly, I suspect that all the rageposting is precisely why the admins greenlight the links…
Another video discussing standup comedy and the social justice war against it, this time with Ben Shapiro, Andrew Klavan, Michael Knowles, and Jeremy Boreing discussing cancel culture, Dave Chapelle, Bill Burr, and why the left has no sense of humor.
Dave Chappelle’s newest Netflix special was hardly just hours old, and already the pearl-clutching nuns of the Internet were doing their best to sink it.
Buzzfeed rebuked Chappelle for his “truly vile” jokes about the trans community, #MeToo and Michael Jackson, lecturing him like a schoolmarm “to be more thoughtful.” Similarly, Paste and Vanity Fair called him “fragile” and “stale” respectively. Vice — a site that publishes frequently enough about dildos to have a page dedicated to it — told its audience to “skip” the show, advice that apparently had the opposite of the intended effect.
But Chappelle’s latest hour is just the most recent, and probably loudest, shot in a culture war that has been brewing between a mob of increasingly influential Internet nuns and comedians. Decades ago it was George Carlin raging against political correctness, but now the battle is pitched, the stakes are considerably higher, and one wrong word can get you “canceled.”
“It’s come full circle, now they’re eating each other,” comedian Nick Di Paolo, who just released his own special, “Breath of Fresh Air,” told the Daily Caller. “I’m the counter culture now, guys like me that lean right, those people, the woke ones, they are the culture. That’s how bad it is, that Chappelle and Bill Burr are labeled like the Anti-PC guys.”
Every political incorrect joke is a blow against the empire…
It’s not like I set out to make Bill Burr Video Saturday, but he just keeps popping up. (And keep in mind, Burr says he leans left and obviously isn’t a Trump fan.) Here he is on why he has no sympathy for Hillary.
. Fark used to be more-or-less balanced between left and right posters, but that went away several years ago (long before Trump), and now it’s overwhelmingly left-wing trolling. Every time the Clown Car update gets linked, there’s a tsunami of hate posting, “your blog sucks,” accusations of paying off admins, etc. Honestly, I suspect that all the rageposting is precisely why the admins greenlight the links…