Posts Tagged ‘Media Watch’

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Rolling Stone Very Concerned That Random YouTuber Might Fight The Man

Thursday, August 24th, 2023

Rolling Stone has evidently moved on from libeling random lacrosse teams for being gang rapists to writing hit pieces about random YouTubers.

Of course, the random YouTuber in this piece, Cody Crone AKA Wranglerstar, has 2.41 million subscribers, meaning he has more than five times as many viewers as Rolling Stone has subscribers.

I’ve watched the occasional Wranglerstar video for homesteading and prepping information, but never noticed any bomb-throwing proclivities. But the Rolling Stone piece by Miles Klee seems to be a blatant hit piece.

One of the main contentions is Klee’s portrayal of Crone’s comedic or satirical videos as factual and instructional. The blending of satire with fact can often create misleading perceptions. It’s important for journalists to differentiate between the two, rather than painting everything with the same brush.

Moreover, Klee’s article leans heavily on the negative aspects of Crone’s channel, with little consideration of its broader context. For instance, discussions about preparedness or self-defense can be essential for people living in remote areas, where reliance on immediate help might not always be feasible. The article also fails to mention the vast amount of educational content Wranglerstar has provided over the years, focusing solely on the more controversial topics.

The growth of platforms like YouTube and TikTok allows for diverse content and narratives. However, it’s essential for journalism to remain objective and provide a balanced view. Misrepresentation not only undermines the credibility of media outlets but can also unjustly tarnish the reputation of individuals who rely on these platforms to share their voice and experiences.

It is also important to note that Klee recently openly mocked and ridiculed the movie, “Sound of Freedom”. “I watched Jim Caviezel’s QAnon-ish child-trafficking drama “Sound of Freedom” with the kind of muttering, coughing, “Amen!”-bellowing boomers who have made it a right-wing indie hit. Hard to overstate just how disgusting it was!” Klee wrote on his Threads account.

So Klee is evidently someone that hates preppers and movies about people who fight sex trafficking equally.

Here’s Wranglerstar’s own response, how received tons of threats after the Rolling Stone piece, how law enforcement offers reached out to him with credible threats against him and his family, and how he initially took down his videos, then regretted doing so.

The amazing thing to me is how Rolling Stone, a theoretically still-important member of the Fifth Column Fourth Estate, literally went after a random guy on YouTube for daring to suggest prepping for hard times and potential government oppression. So much for those “counterculture” roots, Rolling Stone declares itself firmly in the camp of Team Bootheel and seems very, very concerned that some random guy in Washington state might not knuckle under to The Man…

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Posted in Communism, Jihad, Media Watch, unions, video | 10 Comments »

Movie Review: Oppenheimer

Monday, August 7th, 2023

Title: Oppenheimer
Director: Christopher Nolan
Writers: Christopher Nolan, Kai Bird, Martin Sherwin
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Jason Clarke, Benny Safdie, Josh Hartnett, Alden Ehrenreich

I finally saw Oppenheimer, and if you have an interest in the subject, it’s well worth seeing. It’s a near-great film that’s great when it covers the atomic bomb project, and considerably less great when It Has Important Things To Say.

The movie covers much of the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), director of the Los Alamos part of the project to build the atomic bomb. The movie has a non-linear format, using the framing device of two different hearings (on the renewal of Oppenheimer’s security clearance, and the cabinet confirmation hearing for Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), who lured Oppenheimer to Princeton and oversaw the Atomic Energy Commission, and who is eventually revealed to be the film’s antagonist) interspersed with Oppenheimer’s life before and during the The Manhattan Project.

When the film is good, it’s flat out great. The scenes here tend to be small in scope, seldom more than a minute long, slowly building up Oppenheimer’s life, his love and study of physics, his dalliance with communism (he was a fellow-traveler who never joined the party, but did take a commie (Florence Pugh) as his first wife and an ex-commie (Emily Blunt) as his second), his dismay as a Jewish American at the rise of Nazism, and his involvement in the atomic bomb effort.

The brevity of the scenes is one of the film’s greatest strengths. Though mostly quiet and understated in themselves, they slowly build up a heady steam of narrative momentum. By the time they get to Los Alamos itself you’re absolutely riveted.

And it gets better. The scenes leading up to the Trinity detonation are a masterpiece of film editing, successfully ratcheting the tension higher and higher just by showing scenes of the elaborate preparations leading up to the blast, under-laid by Ludwig Göransson’s tense, violin-heavy score. I saw the film in IMAX, and I think I got my money’s worth out of that sequence alone.

But that headlong pace enfolds within it a problem: Things move so fast, that some scenes have a certain checkmark quality to them, so that you know exactly what’s coming. Gee, when commie girlfriend picks up a Sanskrit text, what do you want to bet that the passage he’s reading is “I am become death, destroyer of worlds?”

Please, no wagering.

But that’s a minor problem compared to the biggest flaw of Oppenheimer, which is what they chose to include as the main non-Trinity storyline. Why have the climax of your film feature the literal explosion of an atomic bomb when you can spend the rest of it on the pulse-pounding excitement of committee meetings?

To be fair to Nolan, this is obviously the film he wanted to make, and the film is called Oppenheimer rather than The Making of the Atomic Bomb. And the committee meeting scenes are as well-acted, well-directed and well-paced as you could reasonably ask of a big-budget, A-list Hollywood film. But the real reason they’re there is so the leftist screenwriters can Say Important Things.

Oppenheimer must feel massive guilt and remorse for having helped usher in the atomic age, because this is Approved Opinion. Leftists, even commies, must be shown in a positive light, because this is Approved Opinion. Likewise, McCarthyism must be shown to be Very Bad, so all the crimes of communism have to be kept offstage.

Indeed, an awful lot happens off-stage, including the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then again, Oppenheimer is the viewpoint character.

From my better-than-the-average-layman-understanding-at-how-an-atomic-bomb-works-but-hardly-an-expert vantage point, the historical accuracy for the film seems painstaking and effective. I understood why Klaus Fuchs was important when he was introduced, appreciated the Nixie tubes in the Trinity countdown, and figured out the guy with the bongos must have been Richard Feynman. Everything sure as hell looks accurate, and the New Mexico photography is gorgeous.

But with so much time spent on the commie and Strauss plots, and Oppenheimer having visions of particle physics (early) and atomic destruction (late), the rest of the film (the far more interesting part) feels a bit rushed. Plus the sheer smallness of the stakes that drive the frame-story/post-Trinity portion feels like a distinct anticlimax. Indeed, the primary subplot turns out to be (spoilers) Strauss secretly shiving Oppenheimer by getting his security clearance yanked for…his supporting export of radioactive isotopes to Norway? It’s like if during the climax of Kill Bill, you find out that the Bride’s entire motivation for her revenge spree was Bill never returning her DVD of Steel Magnolias.

All that said, this is still an exceptionally good film, and even the ostensibly bad guys Have Their Reasons. Even hydrogen bomb father Edward Teller (Benny Safdie), who the writers must have been tempted to turn into a secondary villain, comes across as a smart, sympathetic figure. And history validates both his and Strauss’ view that America was right to move forward on the H-Bomb, as the Soviets were utterly untrustworthy as arms control treaty partners.

I expect Oscar nominations galore.

If you’re the kind of person that would watch a three hour movie on the making of the atomic bomb, this is the one to watch.

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Posted in Communism, Media Watch, Military | 15 Comments »

LinkSwarm for August 4, 2023

Friday, August 4th, 2023

More Biden Crime Family evidence surfaces, another mysterious Chinese bio-lab (this one much closer to home than Wuhan), more blue city real estate disaster, and Tim Scott screws up. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!



  • “Joe Biden Allegedly Interacted With Son’s Clients More Than 200 Times.”

    President Joe Biden vehemently denied ever talking business with his son, “or with anyone else” in the run-up to the 2020 election. In fact, Biden even fat-shamed an Iowa voter who approached the subject during the Democratic primaries. On the debate stage with Donald Trump, the former vice president peddled conspiracies of Russian interference when emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop revealed otherwise.

    On Sunday night, the New York Post reported on anticipated testimony from Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer. The 48-year-old who went golfing with the Bidens in 2014 is expected to tell the House Oversight Committee how Hunter Biden put his father in contact with foreign businessmen and potential investors at least 24 times. According to the Post, such meetings were either in person or by speakerphone, with Hunter Biden often dialing in Joe.

    Beyond those meetings, there are more than 180 other episodes where the president interacted with his son’s business partners, contrary to his campaign claims of “absolute” separation.

  • “Multiple Banks Filed Over 170 ‘Suspicious Activity’ Reports On The Bidens.”

    As the evidence for at least an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden mounts, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and co-host Ben Ferguson discussed the latest bombshell – 170 suspicious activity reports (SARs) from six banks over the past few years – on their podcast with House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY).

    As Townhall reports, these SARs are submitted and sent to the Treasury Department when banks “have a strong suspicion” that a crime has been committed, so as to protect the bank.

    As Comer emphasized, these are submitted “very seldom.”

    If someone were to have two, the chairman explained, it would be hard for that person to open up a bank account.

    Submitting an SAR, Comer added, also is “inviting the regulators to come in and regulate,” which is the last thing banks want.

    The 170 reports are thus quite significant.

  • And still more Biden corruption news: “Devon Archer’s full testimony released.”

    The full transcript from Devon Archer’s sworn testimony before the House Judiciary Committee from Monday, July 31, has been released. During that testimony, Archer told Rep. Dan Goldman that Hunter Biden had been placed on the board of directors for Ukrainian energy company Burisma in order to “legally” intimidate people.

    During that question period, Goldman asked Archer “So based on everything you saw, heard, and observed, did you have any knowledge of Joe Biden having any involvement with Burisma?”

    Archer said that while he did not have “direct” knowledge, it was his view that Burisma would not last were in not for Joe Biden’s involvement. “My only thought is that I think Burisma would have gone out of business if it didn’t have the brand attached to it. That’s my, like, only honest opinion,” Archer said. He went on to say that the company was able to survive for as long as it did because Hunter was on the board.

    “Just because of the brand,” Archer said. The “brand” refers to the Biden name. Speaking with The Post Millennial, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene said that the brand was not only Biden, but the vice presidency during Biden’s tenure.

    “How does that have an impact?” Goldman asked.

    “Well, the capabilities to navigate D.C.,” Archer said, “that they were able to, you know, basically be in the news cycle. And I think that preserved them from a, you know, from a longevity standpoint. That’s like my honest—that’s what I—tht’s like how I think holistically.”

    “But how would that work?” Goldman asked.

    “Because people would be intimidated to mess with them,” Archer replied.

    “In what way?” Goldman pressed.

    “Legally,” Archer said.

    Archer also spoke about the meetings during which Joe Biden would call in, or be called. “He put him on speakerphone, again, occasionally. Specifics, like, you know, dinner—you know, dinners occasionally.” Archer was asked to describe the dinners, and said “I remember a dinner in Paris with a French energy company that was—we were speaking to an advisor, and then—we were speaking to. And it was really a Rosemont Seneca Advisors type of—a Rosemont Seneca Advisors kind of a pitch, at the end of the day. And there was a talk, and he said that we’re at this—you know, we’re at this restaurant in Paris, and he put him on the speaker. So that did happen. There were other people there.”

    That dinner, specifically, was attended by “myself; Hunter; Eric Schwerin; and then the executives from the French energy company,” Archer said.

    Another was in “Beijing, at, you know, some restaurant,” Archer said, “—or Chengdu or something like I don’t remember the—I don’t remember specifics. This was just—it was not—t was like a, you know—especially with the time zone difference, there was—you know, there were meetings where his dad would call and he would be talking to him or put him on speaker. I’m not going to—you know, that’s—that happened.”

    Archer said that the conversation at that dinner, with Jonathan Li, was primarily niceties. But it was his contention that getting the vice president on the phone, showing off that kind of access, was what those calls were all about. Archer testified that Hunter Biden would say things like “Hey, guys, my dad’s on the phone.”

    Another call, which Archer revealed during questioning by Rep. Jim Jordan, took place in Dubai. During this impromptu meeting, Hunter Biden was contacted by Burisma’s CEO Zlochevsky, who said “We’re under pressure. We need to go—we want to talk to Hunter.” Hunter called DC, and Archer was “not in the earshot” of that call.

    It was only 5 days after that call that Joe Biden “has a trip to the Ukraine, and he makes a statement: ‘It’s not enough to set up a new anti-corruption bureau and establish a special prosecutor fighting corruption. The Office of the General Prosecutor desperately needs reform.” That was in 2015, and Biden withheld $1 billion in loan guarantees from Ukraine until such time as the prosecutor Viktor Shokin was fired.

    The full transcript is here.

  • Know who else is squealing on the Biden Crime Family? Jill Biden’s ex-husband.

    Bill Stevenson, who was married to Jill Biden between 1970 and 1975, told Newsmax last week that the president’s brother, Frankie Biden, tried to intimidate him during his divorce with Jill, and claimed the family threatened him with repercussions.

    “Frankie Biden of the Biden crime family comes up to me and he goes, “Give her the house or you’re going to have serious problems,”” Stevenson said. “I looked at Frankie and I said, “Are you threatening me?” and needless to say, about two months later, my brother and I were indicted for that tax charge for $8,200.”

    When asked to clarify whether he thinks Joe Biden was behind the tax charge, Stevenson told host Greg Kelly: “I not only think it, but I know it,” adding that he “could not believe the power of Joe Biden and the Department of Justice. I couldn’t believe it.”

    Kelly also noted the parallels between Stevenson’s case and Hunter Biden’s ongoing tax troubles – noting that Hunter was hit with just two misdemeanor counts for $2.2 million in unpaid taxes, while Stevenson and his brother were slapped with two felonies for just over $8,000 in unpaid taxes.

  • This is a weird, disturbing story: Mysterious Chinese bio-lab discovered in Reedley, CA in the central San Joaquin Valley.

    Court documents detail the horrors and dangerous nature of an illegal lab found in Reedley, California, exposed several months ago by a city code enforcement officer. What was found inside prompted the fire chief to send a letter to city officials describing it as a “potential disaster for the city.”

    An investigation into the warehouse was prompted by a simple garden hose that was illegally attached and coming out of a wall in the back of the building.

    “Frankly, we knew that should not have been there and when she went to investigate, she found that there was activity or operation or something happening within that building,” said Reedley City Manager Nicole Zieba.

    The city then obtained a search warrant to look inside what should have been an ordinary warehouse. Inside, they found thousands of vials, many of which contained bio-hazardous materials like human blood, and other unknown substances.

    “There was over 800 different chemicals on site in different bottles of different acids. Unfortunately, a lot of these are being categorized under ‘unknown chemicals,’” said Assistant Director of the Fresno County Department of Public Health Joe Prado. “A lot of these labels have been removed from bottles so there was only so much testing we could do [on] those chemicals.”

    Health officials also discovered nearly 1,000 lab mice, 200 of which were dead.

    Prado said the warehouse occupants claimed they were “doing some testing on laboratory mice that would help them support [and develop] the COVID test kits that they had on-site.”

    According to court documents, officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tested what they could and determined that at least 20 potentially infectious viral, bacterial, and parasitic agents were present, including E. coli, malaria, and the virus that causes COVID-19.

    What. The. Hell?

  • “Biden White House asked Facebook to tweak algorithm to push mainstream over conservative news.” Of course they did. That’s viewpoint discrimination.
  • “Scientists Call for Full Retraction of Nature’s Proximal Origin Paper, as Fraud Accusations Mount.” Their response was simplicity itself: They lied.

    A growing number of people, including prominent scientists, are calling for a full retraction of a high-profile study published in the journal Nature in March 2020 that explored the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

    The paper, whose authors included immunology and microbiology professor Kristian G. Andersen, declared that evidence clearly showed that SARS-CoV-2 did not originate from a laboratory.

    “Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus,” the authors wrote in February.

    Yet a trove of recently published documents reveal that Andersen and his co-authors believed that the lab leak scenario was not just possible, but likely.

    “[The] main thing still in my mind is that the lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario,” Andersen said to his colleagues, according to a report from Public, which published a series of Slack messages between the authors.

    Anderson was not the only author who privately expressed doubts that the virus had natural origins. Public cataloged dozens of statements from Andersen and his co-authors—Andrew Rambaut, W. Ian Lipkin, Edward C. Holmes, and Robert F. Garry—between the dates January 31 and February 28, 2020 suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 may have been engineered.

    ” …the fact that we are discussing this shows how plausible it is,” Garry said of the lab-leak hypothesis.

    “We unfortunately can’t refute the lab leak hypothesis,” Andersen said on Feb. 20, several days after the authors published their pre-print.

  • Ukrainian naval drone hits Russian Ropuha-class landing ship Olenegorski Gornjak. The ship may not have sank, but was seen listing heavily, so is likely out of action for a while.
  • “George Soros-tied fund, Fortress buy bankrupt Vice Media for $350M.” Evil money after bad…(Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • Sadly, I think Kurt is right on the money here: “Tim Scott Is Too Soft to Be Our Nominee.”

    The rap on Tim Scott is that he is too nice to be a modern Republican, but that’s wrong – he’s too weak to be a modern Republican. The man consistently defaults to submission to the woke left, but the times call for a warrior and his brand is soft surrender. Yeah, it would be nice to live in an era where we have the luxury of a president who dodged the draft in the culture wars, but we do not live in that time. Tim Scott needs to stay right where he is, an affable but unaccomplished senator firmly within the tradition of the political puffballs that South Carolina’s GOP inexplicably turns out. Let him be nice somewhere where his alleged niceness won’t shaft us again.

    It could have been different, but that would require a different man than Tim Scott. There are moments that define a candidate, moments where they have a choice and the choice they make makes or breaks them. Kamala Harris decided to take what is essentially a footnote within the Florida history standards and contort it into some sort of lie about how Ron DeSantis loves slavery. It’s one of those issues where the claim is so facially ludicrous that you have to wonder if Kamala is stupid or cynical – and come to the conclusion that she is probably both. But she went with it and DeSantis pushed back and we were moving on when someone in the regime media asked Tim Scott about it.

    This was his decision point. It was an opportunity to show who he is. And Tim Scott whiffed.

    Taking the wrong side in the social justice war is disqualifying. Scott has gone from being maybe my third favorite candidate in the field and a strong Veepstakes possibility to being behind Doug Bergrum and Vivek Ramaswamy.

  • “Oakland NAACP blasts progressive city leaders demands more action on rising crime.”

    Oakland residents are sick and tired of our intolerable public safety crisis that overwhelmingly impacts minority communities. Murders, shootings, violent armed robberies, home invasions, car break-ins, sideshows, and highway shootouts have become a pervasive fixture of life in Oakland. We call on all elected leaders to unite and declare a state of emergency and bring together massive resources to address our public safety crisis…

    Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police, our District Attorney’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who murder and commit life threatening serious crimes, and the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric have created a heyday for Oakland criminals. If there are no consequences for committing crime in Oakland, crime will continue to soar.

    People are moving out of Oakland in droves. They are afraid to venture out of their homes to go to work, shop, or dine in Oakland and this is destroying economic activity. Businesses, small and large, struggle and close, tax revenues vanish, and we are creating the notorious doom-loop where life in our city continues to spiral downward. As economic pain increases, the conditions that help create crime and criminals are exacerbated by desperate people with no employment opportunities.

    We are in crisis and elected leaders must declare a state of emergency and bring resources together from the city, the county, and the state to end the crisis. We are 500 police officers short of the number that experts say Oakland needs. Our 911 system does not work. Residents now know that help will not come when danger confronts them. Worse, criminals know that too…

    There is nothing compassionate or progressive about allowing criminal behavior to fester and rob Oakland residents of their basic rights to public safety. It is not racist or unkind to want to be safe from crime. No one should live in fear in our city.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Oakland residents can look across the bay to see what happens to cities Social Justice Warriors control. “Every store on Market Street is closed.”
  • San Francisco hardware store lost $700,000 to organized shoplifting. (Hat Tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of blue city retail apocalypses: “Field Office, a Trophy Complex Unable to Find Tenants, Defaults on $73.8 Million Loan. Goldman Sachs and Lincoln Property stopped making payments.”

    The owners of Field Office, a 290,375-square-foot office complex near the Willamette River, have defaulted on their $73.8 million loan after being unable to find enough tenants, becoming the latest office owners to throw in the towel on Portland’s struggling office market.

    Field Office is owned by New York investment bank Goldman Sachs and Lincoln Property Co., a Dallas-based real estate firm with operations in Portland. The pair bought Field Office from local developer Project^ and National Real Estate Advisors, an investment firm based in Washington, D.C., for $118 million in April 2019, according to public records.

    Funny how letting antifa/#BlackLivesMatter rioters and crime run rampant through your downtown destroys property values. #ThisIsYourCityOnSocialJustice

  • Black Florida State University professor who published numerous studies on “systemic racism” is fired for just making shit up. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • You’re a Texas republican congressman who’s also an ER doctor and you try to assist a teenage girl having a medical emergency? That’s a handcuffing.
  • Want speak at our webiner? Professor: Sure. OK, here’s your bill for €80,000.
  • Food giant sued over discriminating against white men.

    A former employee of a large food service corporation is suing the company in federal court after it fired her for refusing to participate in a program that discriminates against white male employees.

    Courtney Rogers worked for Charlotte, North Carolina-based Compass Group USA Inc. from her home office in San Diego, California.

    The company had more than 280,000 employees and $20.1 billion in revenue in 2019, according to its LinkedIn profile.

  • “Back in 2018, NBA megastar LeBron James opened his I Promise School in Akron, Ohio with the noble goal of transforming the lives of at-risk students and parents in his hometown. But it appears that the school has some major challenges five years into its existence. According to a report from the Akron Beacon Journal, the I Promise School’s fall class of eighth graders has has not seen a single student pass the state’s math test in five years – since the group was in the third grade.”
  • “University of North Texas Announces Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Office is “Dissolved.'” Good. But the people who staffed it also need to be laid off.
  • Kickstarter cracks down on AI.
  • “Family Torn Between Placing Grandpa In Hospice And Having Him Run For Senate.”
  • We should all be so happy:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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    Posted in Crime, Democrats, Media Watch, Military, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Welfare State | 7 Comments »

    Taibbi: How The Left Lost Its Mind

    Monday, July 31st, 2023

  • “It’s as simple as people thought everything was permitted in pursuit of getting rid of Donald Trump.”
  • Taibbi says he wasn’t pushed out of Rolling Stone, he just thought he could make more money by leaving. And he was right! “Let’s just say that I’m making many times over more than I was making at Rolling Stone.”

  • MT: I don’t believe a lot of the identity politics that are being proffered by the current version of the Democratic Party are genuine. And my first experience with this, where I really, really thought about this, was when I was following Bernie Sanders’s campaign in 2016. And there was a moment in that campaign where he first started to really draw blood against Hillary right. You might remember it was like in February, uh, or late January of 2016. He was hammering her on her ties to Goldman Sachs and other Banks. The New York Post interestingly did this, published this big list of all of her speech commitments and it was kind of amazing. And she wouldn’t release the transcripts right she wouldn’t release the transcripts. I mean, even the schedule was amazing. She was doing three hundred thousand dollars in the morning and then flying to some place and doing 400 Grand or something.

    Reason: Yeah circle of the Bilderbergers, or whatever.

    MT: And they tried everything to hit back, and nothing worked until she said: “If we break up the banks tomorrow, will that end racism?” And Bernie was paralyzed by that.

    Reason: Yeah, Bernie’s an old school, he’s a real old school Commie. I mean, like where it’s class and everything else is a distraction, right? That, you know, capitalists will use race in order to keep the workers from realizing, no, they’re all on the same side well

    MT: I almost wish he was that, because you know Bernie also marched in, you know, in for the civil rights movement in the 60s. And he was terrified of the idea that he might be accused of racism. It mortified him, and I think it really slowed his campaign.

    Reason: There was also that moment, I think it might have been in Seattle or something, where he was almost literally pushed off the stage by a couple of black activists, who were like “We need to be talking about racial concerns,” not whatever he was talking about.

    MT: Right, not your class thing. [And] that was when they started to sort of demonize the white working class, right, which is a brilliant strategic move. Also, interestingly, it was the exact opposite of what the Clintons had done in the 90s. You know the Clinton’s whole strategy was let’s peel off a little bit of that white working class-

    Reason: We feel their pain.

    MT: We feel their pain, right. And that’s, you know, they just got over the finish line doing that. So we can add to the sins of Hillary Clinton that she also injected identity politics.

    With all due respect to Taibbi, identity politics had been injected into the Democratic Party’s DNA long before the 2016 presidential race.

  • “Trump [has] been an enormous Boon to the intelligence Services they’ve been able to say hey if you if you code as somebody who sides with Trump…essentially they’ve created what I like to call the One Villain Theory of the Universe. Which is if you’re on Trump’s side, that means you’re on Putin’s side, which means you’re also on Assad’s side, you’re on Orban’s side, you’re on the side of domestic violence.”
  • MT: “Covid has a whole long list of things that have added to Middle America’s grievances. Beginning with the fact that it it increasingly looks like they lied to us about the origins of the disease for some pretty weak reasons. Maybe they were trying to cover up some research they were doing. That’s thing one that’s looking increasingly likely. At the very least they excluded the possibility of that illegitimately and used

    Reason: “And that’s where the government was telling Twitter and Facebook, like, don’t run this stuff or they’ll squelch it.”

  • “I did a story about Loudoun County, Virginia, when Republicans won the gubernatorial election there. And there were people there who were furious at the way they had been portrayed in the media, as racists or anti-vaxxers. Really, they wanted their kids to go back to school, because they had done their own research online, they found the kids weren’t really at risk, and their kids weren’t learning anything, and it was a burden on them personally, right? So there’s a million things like this.”

    • I don’t agree with all Taibbi’s takes, and a whole lot of things were going wrong with the left long before he deigned to notice it, but over all it’s an interesting interview.

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    Posted in Communism, Democrats, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, video | 2 Comments »

    Mark Zuckerberg Has Been A Very Bad Robot Boy

    Thursday, July 27th, 2023

    Meta, AKA “The Artist Formerly Known As Facebook,” announced that they just lost $21 billion on their Reality Labs division, AKA the Metaverse, AKA the worst virtual reality environment since January 2022.

    Meta’s second-quarter earnings showed that Reality Labs, its virtual and augmented reality development business, has lost a staggering $21.3 billion since January 2022 — and executives warned the bleeding will only get worse.

    The unit recorded $276 million in Q2 sales this year — down from the $339 million it drew in during Q1, underscoring how VR and AR technology has yet to infiltrate the mainstream.

    The losses were wider than analysts expected, though CFO Susan Li suggested in the report that Meta will continue to invest in the tech, which is used to power the metaverse.

    “For Reality Labs, we expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and investments to further scale our ecosystem,” Li wrote.

    Just last month, Meta unveiled its Quest 3 headset for $499, which Mark Zuckerberg touted as “the first mainstream headset with high-res color mixed reality,” though it’s unclear how successful the tech has been so far.

    Hint: Not at all.

    Just how do you lose $21 billion? That’s a burn rate of over a billion a month. You could hire a mountain of developers and engineers for that money, maybe 100,000 or so of them even at California salary rates. Wikipedia (usual caveats apply) says Occulus only had 17,00 employees in 2022. Meta only paid $2 billion to acquire Occulas (which became Reality Labs) in the first place. Hell, you could fund over 200 startups at $100 million a pop, and it would still be more likely for any one of them to be profitable than Reality Labs.

    Usually you have to be a politician to lose that much money. I wonder if Reality Labs losses might be covering up losses in other divisions. Or if the money is getting siphoned off to somewhere else entirely…

    Earlier this month, Meta found itself on the defense in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by stand-up comic Sarah Silverman and authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey, who alleged that Meta’s artificial intelligence-backed language models were trained on illegally-acquired datasets containing the authors’ work.

    The suit against Meta points to the allegedly illicit sites used to train LLaMA, the ChatGPT competitor the company launched in February.

    Naturally, anything involving large corporations ripping off science fiction writers attracts my attention, and I used to bump into Kadrey back when I was on the SF con circuit. The same firm is also suing on behalf of Paul Trem­blay and Mona Awad.

    There probably needs to be some sort of regulation on how much AI generated content can come from any particular living creator. If I feed an AI all of Paul McCarthy’s songs, and ask it to produce a new one based on those, is it copyright infringement?

    I suspect a number of lawyers are going to be getting a lot of money off AI in the near future…

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    Posted in Media Watch | 8 Comments »

    Movie Review: The Death of Stalin

    Wednesday, July 19th, 2023

    Title: The Death of Stalin
    Director: Armando Iannucci
    Writers: Fabien Nury (comic book and original screenplay)), Thierry Robin Armando Iannucci, David Schneider and Ian Martin
    Starring: Steve Buscemi, Jeffrey Tambor, Simon Russell Beale, Jason Isaacs, Michael Palin, Olga Kurylenko, Adrian McLoughlin, Paddy Considine, Paul Whitehouse, Paul Chahidi, Andrea Riseborough, Rupert Friend

    Time for another edition of “Lawrence reviews a movie that came out years ago,” because I don’t have cable or streaming. And The Death of Stalin is a movie I kept waiting to get cheaper or turn up used on DVD, but it never did. So I finally ponied up for a copy.

    Now that I’ve watched it, it’s the rare film that actually lives up to the hype, an absolutely scorching black comedy about high level commies scrambling for power (and survival) as Stalin is dying and after he kicks off.

    It’s a tremendous cast, each giving a great performance, as they play one off the other in the sudden power vacuum. Jeffrey Tambor’s Georgy Malenkov is theoretically in charge but too weak to make anyone fear his authority. Simon Russell Beale’s slimy NKVD head Lavrenti Beria (one of history’s nastiest pieces of work) is decisive and cocksure, believing he has enough dirt on everyone to keep his head above water, no matter how much blood he has on his hands. Steve Buscemi’s Nikita Khrushchev is the reluctant party toady who realizes he has to unite the rest of the Committee against Beria before the latter can purge him. Michael Palin (in echoes of his Monty Python and Brazil roles) plays Vyacheslav Molotov as a man who has so mastered communist doublethink that switches from condemning his imprisoned wife mid-sentence to praising her return when Beria produces her.

    Into the inner circle comes Stalin’s children, Svetlana (Andrea Riseborough), possibly the only main character without blood on her hands, and her drunken brother Vasily (Rupert Friend), whom the Politburo hacks immediately start sucking up to. Finally, into Stalin’s funeral swaggers Field Marshal Zhukov (Jason Isaacs, having tremendous fun with the role), the macho, cocksure head of the military who ultimately provides the fulcrum upon which the others can rid themselves of Beria.

    All of this is done in the hilarious, profane, black comedy style of Director/Writer Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It, right down to the Scottish swearing. Just about everyone here is (as in history) an abhorrent cog in a genocidal totalitarian state, and it’s a pleasure to see them sink knives (rhetorical and otherwise) into each other.

    Beria, the nastiest of the nasty, overplays his hand and succeeds in uniting the others against him, for a bloody, satisfying end.

    Certain liberties have been taken, as historically there were more than nine months between Stalin’s death and Beria’s execution. But The Death of Stalin is faithful to the spirit of the thing, if not the letter.

    All in all, this is a hilarious black comedy, and the best film about communism since The Lives of Others.

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    Posted in Budget, Communism, Media Watch | 14 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for July 14, 2023

    Friday, July 14th, 2023

    More Biden crime family news, Toast Tab burns diners, and a judge blocks the Biden regime censorship. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • “Biden DOJ Indicts Whistleblower Prepared To Testify Against Biden Family.”

    Dr. Gal Luft, the “missing witness” from the Biden corruption investigation, told the NY Post last week that he was arrested in Cyprus to stop him from testifying in front of the House Oversight Committee that the Biden family received payments from individuals linked to Chinese military intelligence, and that they had an FBI mole who shared classified information with the Biden benefactors from the China-controlled energy company CEFC.

    “I told the DOJ that Hunter was associated with a very senior retired FBI official who had a distinct physical characteristic—he had one eye,” Luft said.

    That FBI official is widely believed to be former FBI Director Louis Freeh, who gave $100,000 to a trust for two of then-Vice President Joe Biden’s grandchildren in 2016 shortly before telling Hunter, “I would be delighted to do future work with you.”

    Now, Biden’s DOJ has charged Luft with failing to register under the Foreign Agents Act (FARA), as well as Iranian sanctions violations. He’s alleged to have conspired with others to act in China’s interest, including recruiting and paying a former high ranking U.S. government official to support policies beneficial to China.

    Democrats are turning the federal justice apparatus into banana republic keystone cops to hide their own crimes.

  • Speaking of Hunter: “How reckless Hunter Biden photographed himself driving at 172mph while behind the wheel of his Porsche en route to a days-long Vegas bender with prostitutes and pictured himself smoking CRACK while behind the wheel.” No doubt left-wingers will crow about how Hunter is “living his best life.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Federal judge blocks Biden’s censorship schemes. “Terry Doughty, a Louisiana federal judge, issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday blocking certain federal agencies and officials, including the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Services, from communicating with social-media platforms.” Good.
  • The U.S. Navy blocks Iran from hijacking two tankers.
  • Dispatches from The Biden Recession: “‘Something Just Snapped’: Consumers Panic Search ‘Pawn Shop Near Me.'”
  • Poland is sending Ukraine Mi-24 Hind helicopters. The Hind is getting pretty long in the tooth, but it was a tough beast in its day.
  • “I’m willing to make a bold prediction and say that by the end of October, Mr. Biden will withdraw his reelection bid, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom will be declared the Democrats’ most viable option for the presidency.” I think he’s wrong. I think they’ll try to have Newsom replace Biden at the convention.
  • Just another week in Baltimore: “30 People Shot, 2 Dead As Block Party In Baltimore Turns Into ‘War Zone.'”
  • “CDC Altered Death Certificates to Remove ‘COVID Vaccine’ as Cause.”
  • Nigel Farage is being systematically unbanked.
  • Meta/Facebook’s new Twitter rip-off Threads is filled with “dark design patterns” created to thwart the user’s wishes. (That tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Black Georgia state rep defects from the Democrats to the Republicans over school choice.

    “When I decided to stand up on behalf of disadvantaged children in support of school choice, my Democrat colleagues didn’t stand by me,” [Georgia State House Rep. Mesha] Mainor explained of her decision in a statement to Fox News Digital. “They crucified me. When I decided to stand up in support of safe communities and refused to support efforts to defund the police, they didn’t back me. They abandoned me.”

    “For far too long, the Democrat Party has gotten away with using and abusing the black community,” she added. “For decades, the Democrat Party has received the support of more than 90% of the black community. And what do we have to show for it? I represent a solidly blue district in the city of Atlanta. This isn’t a political decision for me. It’s a moral one.”

  • Nasdaq rebalances.
  • The New York Times is doing such gangbusters business that they just laid off their entire sports department.
  • Garbage restaurant QR code menu app Toast Tab is now taking money directly out of your pockets for a “processing fee.” They’re a garbage company run by garbage people and I hope they go bankrupt.
  • For a mere $950,000, you own the home of the Butthole Surfers in Driftwood, Texas.
  • Happy Bastille Day! Here’s Jerry Pournelle’s timeless essay on the original event.
  • “Hollywood Confused By New Movie That Depicts Child Sex Trafficking As Bad.”
  • Star Turn Doggy:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

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    Posted in Communism, Crime, Democrats, Economics, Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Military, Supreme Court, Texas | 6 Comments »

    LinkSwarm for June 30, 2023

    Friday, June 30th, 2023

    Another half year gone. In one way, it seems impossible that it’s flown by so quickly. In another, I certainly feel tired enough for that, and then some…

    There’s a zillion Biden corruption links I could have added to this week’s LinkSwarm, so feel free to share your favorites in the comments.

    

  • “Prosecutor Reportedly Told Six Witnesses He Was Not Permitted To Charge Hunter Biden.”

    U.S. Attorney David Weiss wanted to bring charges against President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden in Washington, D.C., IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley said on Friday — and when he was reportedly barred from doing so, he told six witnesses.

    Shapley testified on the matter last month, telling the House Oversight Committee that Weiss revealed in an October 2022, meeting that he had actually wanted to charge Hunter Biden in two federal districts but that he had been denied — and when Attorney General Merrick Garland denied that had ever happened, Shapley publicly named the witnesses he said Weiss had told.

    “He surprised us by telling us on the charges, ‘I’m not the deciding official on whether charges are filed,’” Shapley told the committee when he testified in late May. “He then shocked us with the earth-shattering news that the Biden-appointed D.C. U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves would not allow him to charge in his district.

    Shapley explained that by not allowing Weiss to file charges in D.C., Graves had effectively barred Weiss from seeking charges on crimes allegedly committed during 2014 and 2015 — including “foreign income from Burisma [Holdings] and a scheme to evade his income taxes through a partnership with a convicted felon … The purposeful exclusion of the 2014 and 2015 years sanitized the most substantive criminal conduct and concealed material facts.”

    It was at that same meeting in October 2022 that Weiss said his request for special counsel authority had been denied, Shapley said. He was instead told to go through the regular process — which would have once again pitted him against a Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • “‘Bidens are the Best’: Hunter Demanded $10M From Chinese Energy Company, Bragged About Connections.”

    The House Oversight Committee released a Hunter Biden WhatsApp message to Communist Party-linked Chinese energy firm CEFC associate Gongwen Dong.

    Hunter demanded $10 million because $5 million “is not acceptable obviously.”

    Hunter then said his shell company Owasco “in consultation with Hudson” will determine his expenses along with the “BIDEN (loan 5M) capital.”

    It also “baffled” Hunter if the “Chairman” didn’t think the relationship with the Bidens was worth at least $5 million.

    Hunter reassured Gongwen that “The Bidens are the best I know at doing exactly what the Chairman wants from this partnership.”

    Then Hunter told him not to “quibble over peanuts.”

    Man, imagine having to complain about ONLY $5 million dollars.

  • Joe Biden actually picks up when journalist calls burner phone in Hunter Biden laptop docs.
  • Supreme Court strikes down Affirmative Action.

    The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the race-conscious admissions policies of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

    “The Harvard and UNC admissions programs cannot be reconciled with the guarantees of the Equal Protection Clause. Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points. We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts for the six-justice majority.

    However, universities may still consider an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise. Roberts clarified that this does not mean universities can simply establish through application essays or other means the regime declared unlawful by the Court. It means, explained Roberts, “the student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race.”

    Of course our elite liberal institutions are furious, since they desperately want to discriminate the basis of race.

  • Another Russian war crime: “Russia executed 77 civilians detained by its forces.”
  • “First transgender state rep in NH charged with child pornography.” Try to contain your shock. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “The IC Inspector General: China Hacked All of Hillary’s State Dept. Classified Emails. FBI: So What, She’s a Democrat.”
  • Despite lifting of Flu Manchu restrictions, U.S./China flights are only running at 6% of their previous volume.
  • It’s riot season in France again.
  • “Democratic Donor Arrested and Charged With Setting Destructive Wildfire That Democrats Blamed on Climate Change.”
  • Statewide malaria alert in Florida. Cue the MSM stating this is all DeSantis’ fault.
  • Paragraph 2: National Geographic magazine (now owned by Disney) laid off its last remaining staff writers. Paragraph 14: “Among those who lost their jobs in the latest layoff was Debra Adams Simmons, who only last September was promoted to vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion at National Geographic Media.” Usually it takes longer for DEI to destroy a company… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of Disney disasters, Indiana Jones and the Dial Up Internet of Depravity: “What a fucking incomprehensible calamity of a film this is. I mean, I’d be lying if I said I went into it expecting great things, but Jesus Fucking Mother of Christ, this was worse than anything I could have imagined.”
  • eBay has glitch that adds sold items as available.
  • “7 Simple Ways To Get Away With A Massive Foreign Bribery Scheme.” “Get one of your immediate family members elected to a powerful office: Like your father, for one completely random example.”
  • “Hollywood Concerned As They’re Running Out Of Beloved Movie Heroes To Turn Into Sad, Pathetic Old Failures.”
  • “Karine Jean-Pierre Throws Smoke Bomb And Disappears When Asked About Hunter Biden Texts.”
  • Baily loves tiny bunny.

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    Posted in Communism, Crime, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Media Watch, Social Justice Warriors, Supreme Court, Waste and Fraud | 5 Comments »

    The Democratic Media Complex Really Hates Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

    Monday, June 26th, 2023

    I was going to do a post rounding up the sudden spat of absolutely unhinged attacks on Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has had the unmitigated gall to actually primary Slow Joe Biden. Only to find out that Tucker Carlson had already done it for me.

    Some takeaways:

  • There’s never been a candidate for president the media hated more than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. You thought that title belonged to Donald Trump. Of course it must! But go check the coverage. Trump got a gentle scalp massage by comparison when he announced. When Trump rolled out his presidential campaign in 2015, the New York Times waited until the 17th paragraph of the story to attack him. “But as well known as he is,” the paper said at the time, “Trump is also widely disliked.” Then they cited a poll to back it up. That was the attack on Trump. Eight years later, the Times attacked Bobby Kennedy in the very first sentence of the story. Quote, “Robert F Kennedy, Jr.” the paper declared, “announced a presidential campaign on Wednesday built on relitigating covid-19 shutdowns and shaking Americans faith in science.”

  • “You’d think Bobby Kennedy just declared war on the enlightenment!”
  • “NPR devoted an entire segment to savaging Kennedy, not just as a candidate, but as a human being. NPR described him as someone who, for his own perverse reasons, has made, quote, debunked and false and misleading claims that undermine trust in vaccines, and who in his spare time provides moral support to crazed extremists.”
  • “People magazine didn’t even bother to report a single word of anything Kennedy said at his announcement, and instead wrote an entire story about how his relatives hate him.” Having the entire Kennedy clan hate him would only increase my (admittedly low) estimation of him.
  • When did the Democratic Media Complex start hating him? July of 2005. “That’s the moment that Kennedy published a magazine article suggesting there might be a link between the rise in diagnosed autism cases and the ever-expending schedule of mandatory childhood vaccines.”
  • “The Pharma Lobby rolled out the most ferocious public relations campaign in memory and both [Rolling Stone and Salon] swiftly caved. Both pulled the story, and then disavowed it groveling as they did.” Both of those outlets were already on shaky ground, though neither was as bad as they become later.

  • No one in the national media bothered to explain why autism diagnoses had skyrocketed. If it wasn’t the vaccines, and maybe it wasn’t, then what was it? To this day there has not been a convincing explanation. Instead, reporters just attacked Bobby Kennedy. They’ve called him a lunatic and a Nazi. Instagram shut down his account YouTube just last week pulled down a perfectly reasonable interview he did with Jordan Peterson.

    • Speaking of which, here RFK Jr. explains to Jordan Petersen how he thinks ObamaCare got the Democratic Party in bed with Big Pharma.

    I’ve omitted a lot of Carlson providing example after example of various Democratic Media Complex personalities viciously attacking Kennedy.

    I’m no fan of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. His a lefty scumbag on many (perhaps most) issues, has more than a whiff of fringe lunacy about him, and (through no fault of his own) I find him hard to listen to, due to his spasmodic dysphonia. (Though obviously he’s much more coherent and articulate than Biden. As is the average third-grader.) And I think he’s more wrong than right on the vaccine-autism link.

    Still, the degree to which the Democratic Media Complex has thrown away even the merest pretense of dispassion about him due to his threat to either a Biden second term or the wishes of Big Pharma (to the extent those two can be disentangled) makes me more inclined to listen to him, and more readily defend his right to speak in the public space. The DNC seems hellbent on presenting any fair challenge to Biden in the Democratic primary, which makes me very curious about just what they’re so scared of…

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    Posted in Democrats, Elections, Media Watch, ObamaCare, video | 8 Comments »

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