Archive for November, 2021

Narratives Narratives Narratives under the Fedora

Posted: November 24, 2021 by datechguy in Uncategorized

One of the most telling moments of the attack in Waukesha was this moment when a local station had an eyewitness on live and this took place:

As soon as it was clear the killer was black suddenly it was a problem that the interview was live.

It can’t be broadcast live if it doesn’t fit the narrative:

And what happens when the narrative doesn’t help the cause? DaTechGuy’s laws of Media Outrage kicks in to wit:

It’s not a national story if it doesn’t fit the narrative.

The New Neo notices that the low bail that allowed the Waukesah killer to go out and kill was something the DA didn’t find a mistake before it became a political problem:

“Chisholm, who was elected in 2007, supports deferrals for some misdemeanors and “low-level” felonies in order to cut down on incarcerations. And he’s taken credit for inspiring a new wave of prosecutors in cities like San Francisco, St. Louis, and Philadelphia who have enacted similar reforms. Chisholm congratulated San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin following his election in 2019, and the pair spoke at a forum earlier this year on the status of the progressive prosecutor movement.”

So this guy Chisholm is one of the earliest of the “reformers” in this movement. He apparently also knew and accepted that some people would get killed as a result of his policies:

““Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into [a] treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody?” he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2007. “You bet. Guaranteed. It’s guaranteed to happen. It does not invalidate the overall approach.””

Collateral damage, he seems to be saying.

As long as the Collateral damage was to the people and not to the narrative it was acceptable but now it could hurt the narrative so it’s something that deserves a 2nd thought

There are many narratives that are sacred to the left in general and whoever owns the Biden administration in particular and these narratives are not stopped by borders to wit. A soccer player collapsed on the pitch in the middle of the game and the announcer said

I think everyone wants to know if he’s had the COVID vaccine?

That’s when the live feed was cut

Thou must not question the narrative live where regular people can hear it.

Of course once in a while the attempt to force the narrative fails, such as in the case of Peng Shuai:

The disappearance from public view of Chinese tennis champion Peng Shuai and Beijing’s censorship of her accusations of sexual assault are sharpening the focus on China’s handling of human rights as the country prepares to host the upcoming Winter Olympics.

The Women’s Tennis Association (WTA), which governs the worldwide women’s tennis tour, has threatened to pull its business from China over concern for Peng’s safety, marking one of the strongest reactions yet from within the sports world and foreign nations increasingly outraged over Beijing’s actions.

“Our relationship with China is at a crossroads,” WTA Chairman and CEO Steve Simon said in a statement after Chinese state media released images and video purportedly showing Peng out to dinner after she went missing earlier this month.

Simon called the video “insufficient” to confirm Peng’s safety and well-being.

It was the first time Peng was seen publicly in nearly three weeks, having largely vanished from public view after posting on social media allegations of sexual assault against China’s former vice premier.

China’s “Great Firewall” of internet censorship has scrubbed any reference to Peng’s allegations online and has taken offline international news broadcasts discussing her situation.

Millions of Uighur in slave camps companies like Nike & the NBA can ignore but when the world Tennis association didn’t fold and stands up for a former #1 ranked player suddenly folks are getting nervous:

This is a crisis for the media which doesn’t want this narrative for one reason and one reason only

It’s worth repeating: “When is the American public going to realize that it’s not China that the broadcast news divisions are protecting, but the globalist entertainment companies that own the news divisions, and which need Asian markets for maxxing out their entertainment profits?”

Never doubt that power and profit are the primary drivers of the narrative

More important than JFK

Posted: November 23, 2021 by chrisharper in catholic, Church doctrine
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By Christopher Harper

Almost every American who was alive on November 22, 1963, knows where he and she was. That’s because JFK died that day.

But a far more influential man, Clive Staples Lewis, also died that day.

Better known as C.S. Lewis, or Jack to his friends and family, Lewis was one of the most important Christian apologists and fiction writers of the 20th century.

A recent motion picture, The Most Reluctant Convert, tells the story of Lewis’s evolution from atheist to great Christian writer. See https://www.cslewismovie.com/home/

The film doesn’t deal directly with his more famous works, The Chronicles of Narnia and The Screwtape Letters, but follows Lewis’s path from nonbeliever to true believer. 

The Most Reluctant Convert is based on a successful stage play written by Max McLean. This filmed version features McLean as an elderly C.S. Lewis who walks viewers through key dramatized moments in his younger years.

The film uses Lewis’s own words to describe his path. As a young man, he explored the occult, including Nordic mythology. Eventually, he recognized how empty and destructive those choices were. Part of that realization occurred, he said, when he came to the aid of a tormented fellow war veteran who screamed that he was being hounded by devils and dragged into hell.

Lewis began his academic career as an undergraduate student at Oxford University. After a brief but dramatic stint in World War I, where he was wounded, he was elected a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he worked from 1925 to 1954. He later joined the faculty at Cambridge University, where he taught until he died in 1963,

At Oxford, he returned to Christianity, having been influenced by arguments with his Oxford colleague and friend J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of Lord of the Rings. Lewis resisted conversion as he described in Surprised by Joy:

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen [College, Oxford], night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929, I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. 

Let me leave you with two other important quotations from Lewis:

We meet no ordinary people in our lives.

In a much-cited passage from Mere Christianity, Lewis challenged the view that Jesus was a great moral teacher but not God. 

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

The Most Reluctant Convert is an engaging and important film. See it if it’s still in a theater near you!

Under the Fedora: Suddenly Greedy Corps, Gas Prices, Rittenhouse, Brooks and California Mass Looting

Posted: November 23, 2021 by datechguy in Uncategorized

It’s hilarious to see the Biden administration, members of the US Senate and the media now start crying that it was corporations greed that is the cause of inflation.

This might be a convincing argument if it wasn’t for the fact that all of these corporations existed during the trump years and yet inflation wasn’t an issue.

Did they only become greedy once Biden was sworn in?

The cheapest gas in the area at the moment is $3.05 the highest I saw was at a gas station near the hotel in Sturbridge where Pintastic took place at $3.99.

We’re getting mixed messages from the media and administration as to the causes with partisans’ insisting that Biden can’t do anything about it.

Yet somehow Trump had this country as a net exporter of energy (without I should add tapping the strategic oil reserve and I was paying under $2 a gallon.

When energy goes up everything goes up.

I was at Pintastic NE when the Rittenhouse verdict came in. All I could think of was that if he is a pinball fan at Pintastic NE he could walk through the venders hall saying: I’ll take that, and that , and two of that and not dent the dough he is going to end up with the settlements that will be coming when the lawsuits start flaying.

The fact that Americans could see the trail and understand that they had been lied to by the media is going to be really damning. Can you imagine what people would have thought if they didn’t have cameras in court?

I wouldn’t be surprised to see a move to pull them out in the future, can’t have anything competing with the narrative.

Speaking of spin the media was trying hard to convince people that Brooks was fleeing another crime when he ran down those folks at the Christmas parade. At first I was confused as this would make him look pretty bad but once more fact came out that suggests he purposely ran those folks down (and has a history of doing so) it all made sense. Remember the same left that insisted on trying Rittenhouse let this guy out on $1000 bail all for the sake of a political and racial narrative.

Expect the media to do their best to memory hole this story as it’s devastating to every narrative they have pushed for years.

Finally the incredible looting wave that has hit California cities has finally put some fear into some of the Soros DA’s out there, mainly I suspect because of the recall in progress to remove him.

There are plenty of stores big and small that have been devastated due to the decision to not bother enforcing laws and the left didn’t have an issue, but now that there might be a political cost in power, suddenly the outrage comes.

I wish I could say I was surprised.

Pintastic NE 2021 Day 4 Final Day and Catching up

Posted: November 22, 2021 by datechguy in Uncategorized

The last day of Pintastic NE is always a bit of a mix. Checkout time is 11 AM but Pintastic runs till 4. I didn’t book for sunday night so there was a rush in the morning to go to breakfast at Cracker Barrel get back check out and run back in to cover what is there.

Between the band concert and the last day of the extra ball lounge (which runs to about 6 AM) it can be a tad odd.

I didn’t get to the Extra ball lounge till 11 AM and it was empty…almost:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05_r5EFaKvk

They should take a bow this game had a line in front of it constantly. I only had a chance to play it twice during the entire four days myself.

The games were gone but not forgotten. I left this room to eyeball the vendor lounge where the packing up was far advanced but the SNH Pinball club was still rolling on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WzGQwdw6ZE

The Free play room was still going strong and there were quite a few people playing. It’s a quieter day for the security team as there is only one room to really watch so Lisa had time to talk to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPd3NZUp-uo

Without this staff mostly volunteers none of this takes place.

Some games still had lines the big one was the homebrew game Sonic the Hedgehog I talked to the creator who is from the Southern New Hampshire Pinball Club

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXg_IkEonpI

Brian made good use of his lockdown time and I suspect that this will be a big draw for club membership.

With Pintastic done there is a lot of work to do to move machines, there is also a need to find places to play. Southern NH Pinball is one solution but there are others. I talked to Josh Allen of the Bitbar in Salem as he got ready to pack up the Hercules game who operators a restaurant/arcade

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRnVztu7ytY

You need a team to move this giant.

I spent the rest of the day in play until they started to shut down the games and when that moment comes it’s time to speak to Gabe D’Annunzio one more time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVkYkU4o9rE

My Pintastic was done but he had hours of work ahead of him then he can rest but not for long, because when June comes along we’re going to do it al over again.

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