Archive for the ‘culture’ Category

Easy Co vs UVA, UGH Canada, Censoring Praise, Invisible Video and Seeing it Young Under the Fedora

Posted: November 13, 2019 by datechguy in culture, media
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Rewatched “We Stand Together Alone” about Easy Company of the 101st Airborne, the companion piece to Band of Brothers.

When I watch it and then see things like this:

The University of Virginia has canceled the 21-gun salute for its Veterans Day ceremony over concerns that firing weapons on campus could cause “panic” among students.

The salute previously came at the end of the school’s 24-hour vigil and Veterans Day ceremony, a tradition for a decade, although it’s commonly seen in the U.S. as an honor for visiting dignitaries.

I thank God that my father and his generation fought World War 2 instead of this one.

Apparently in Canada these days you don’t need to guns firing to trigger people.

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As the good folks at HotAir put it.

Poor guy. If only he’d done something more innocuous, like repeatedly wearing blackface as an adult, he’d have qualified to earn the support of millions of Canadian liberals who are happy to see him booted off the air today.

I think that’s really why the 85 year old Don Cherry was fired from is announcers post after decades of being a Hockey Icon. He reminded people of what Canadians once were when they had a beach at Normandy to attack vs where they are now.

The folks of the left today don’t like to be reminded of realities, that’s also why when they can’t cancel someone they edit them:

“It’s super cute when journalists/interviewers for magazines leave out the massive part where I give God the glory for the success/ achievements in my life,” Wright tweeted last month. “Haha I still love you and God will still be praised.”

As a very attractive black African woman on one of the best grossing pictures she pushes to many diversity buttons to cancel her but none of that God stuff is getting into those pieces if they can help it.

I’m reminded of what Saint Faustina said after recording her visit to Hell in her diary. Most of the people there didn’t believe there was a hell.

Sometimes even video that anyone can see

and front page headlines that graced the paper isn’t enough to change the official narrative

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I guess Baghdad Bob must have had plenty of children who came to America and became journalists.

Of course there are some who never fell for this stuff even in their youth:

When I was around nine years old, my parents and three younger siblings moved from a leaky roofed ghetto to a new 11-story government project in Baltimore. Everything was brand new, kitchen appliances and so on. Extremely excited, we were among the first families in the building of all-black residents. Within a short time, that building became a huge ghetto. The elevators were routinely out of service due to vandalism. Our apartment was on the 6th floor. Entering the pitch-black stairwell to walk up to our apartment was like walking into the shadow of death, as the sound of stepping on broken wine bottles echoed off the concrete walls. I suspect my fellow residents were Democrats. They believed every problem was always the fault of white racism.
At nine years old, I sarcastically said, “How can we stop mean white people from sneaking into our building at night, breaking light bulbs in the stairwells, peeing, breaking the elevators and smashing wine bottles?” Even at that young age, commonsense told me whitey was not responsible for problems we could fix ourselves.

I would be really interested in hearing what is being said on Black radio and podcasts about Trump, because I suspect that he is going to take an awful lot of the black vote in areas where even a small swing in said vote will make a huge difference.

Realities: Voldemort Media Values, Rescorla or Thunberg and Incel dreams Under the Fedora

Posted: November 12, 2019 by datechguy in culture, media, News/opinion, under the fedora
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The fuss about Molly Hemmingway saying aloud on the air what everyone in the room already knows, namely that the so called “Whistleblower”  Eric Ciaramella is a perfect symbol for the culture the left has given us. The inability to speak aloud the truth, particularly truth that everyone knows, is the hallmark of repression. He has become the media’s Voldemort media (he who must not be named).

We have have won the cold war but I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the Communists won the peace.

One of the aspects of the Voldemort media are the choices to be made. The entire Jeffrey Epstein / ABC /CBS coverup and the firing of someone who they thought was an actual whistleblower has become that which must not be talked about. What I find really interesting is the supposed motive:

ABC was exposed this week for killing a story about Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged pedophile ring, which anchor Amy Robach claimed was due to an upcoming interview the network had with the royal family.

emphasis mine

As a practical matter the amount of stories you would get out of exposing Epstein, particularity in 2016 before the metoo movement and the subsequent number of eyeballs online and ratings on the air that such a story would produce would undoubtedly eclipse the value of an interview with the British Royal Family or even future interview that might be denied the network. I would think that Robach would have been able to make that case with ease.

This tells me that even years later Robach doesn’t see the truth, namely that protecting the friends of the Clinton’s who were expected to be back in the White House trumped everything else in that election year, but to acknowledge that truth is more than some can bear.

Speaking of dealing with truth, stumbled onto James Stewart’s long New Yorker piece from 2002 about Rick Rescorla who died getting folks out of the World Trade Center and re-read it. The final paragraph says a lot:

“What she doesn’t understand is that she knew him for four or five years. She knew a sixty-two-year-old man with cancer. I knew him as a hundred-and-eighty-pound, six-foot-one piece of human machinery that would not quit, that did not know defeat, that would not back off one inch. In the middle of the greatest battle of Vietnam, he was singing to the troops, saying we’re going to rip them a new asshole, when everyone else was worrying about dying. If he had come out of that building and someone died who he hadn’t tried to save, he would have had to commit suicide.
“I’ve tried to tell Susan this, in a way, but she’s not ready yet for the truth. In the next weeks or months, I’ll get her down here, and we’ll take a  walk along the ocean, and I’ll explain these things. You see, for Rick Rescorla, this was a natural death. People like Rick, they don’t die old men. They aren’t destined for that and it isn’t right for them to do so. It just isn’t right, by God, for them to become feeble, old, and helpless sons of bitches. There are certain men born in this world, and they’re supposed to die setting an example for the rest of the weak bastards we’re surrounded with.”

There was a time in our country, a time in my memory where every school boy would know who Rick Rescorla was and dream of being him. Thanks to having a father born in 1921 who served in the pacific I was regularly exposed to men like this and taught to revere them. Not anymore Once or twice a year men like this are spoken of fondly but today our schools and the media which shapes society would condemn Rick Rescorla as a man seething with toxic masculinity and white privilege.

God help us those who do when they need such men again, and they will.

In San Francisco a mural of Greta Thunberg is going up so that all can look upon her stern gaze and repent. At Front Page Magazine Jason Hill a Philosophy professor at DePaul has penned an open letter to this media proclaimed hero:

First, we did not rob you of your childhood or of your dreams. You are the legatee of a magnificent technological civilization which my generation and the one before it and several others preceding it all the way to the Industrial Revolution and the Renaissance, bequeathed to you. That growth-driven, capitalist technological civilization has created the conditions for you to harangue us over our betrayal. It is a civilization that eradicated diseases such as small pox from the word, and that lifted millions out of abject poverty in a universe you think is dying and decaying. It assured you a life expectancy that exceeded that of your ancestors. Most likely by focusing on economic growth which you demonize, and scientific advancement, that civilization will further enhance a robust quality of life and health for your descendants.


Here is a hard truth to ponder, Greta: if the great producers of this world whom you excoriate were to withdraw their productivity, wealth and talents—in short—their minds from the world today, your generation would simply perish. Why? Because as children you have done nothing as yet, with your lives besides being born. This is what we expect of children until such time as they can be producers by learning from their elders. You are understandably social and ecological ballast. You are not yet cognitively advanced to replicate the structures of survival of which you are the beneficiaries.

Greta Thunberg is a useful idiot which is why our cultural betters given the choice of her or Rick Rescorla their hero will always go for the former. Men like Rescorla did not play the idiot for others.

I laughed when I saw this story at the Daily Sun:

Sex robot factory ‘looks like Westworld’ after producing ‘hyper-realistic’ dolls
EXCLUSIVE: Silicone Lovers told Daily Star Online it is using a workshop that mirrors fictional HBO hit Westworld to produce sex robots with advanced human-like technology

The mirth comes from three things that instantly came to mind.

  1. Odds are if you can afford such a robot (as opposed to a lower end one that goes for say 2-10 grand) you’re likely rich enough to be able to attract a real woman. But I’m sure the prices will eventually drop so that every incel can have one.
  2. These will never be “hyper-realistic” until they can say no and enforce that statement.
  3. I don’t care how realistic these things are, until they are self cleaning and self disinfecting you couldn’t pay me enough to try one let alone own one.

Some advice for the ladies, if you discover your date has one of these in his apartment or house, run, this guy is a loser.

Vets, Asheed, Cleese, Idle and Cellphones Under the Fedora

Posted: November 11, 2019 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, culture, under the fedora
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It’s Veterans Day a holiday everywhere (except where I work of course). On on this day we take a few minutes to remember the folks to whom being “triggered” meant someone trying to kill them rather than someone saying something they don’t like on social media.

It never ceases to amaze me how so many Americans squander the freedom these men and women bequeathed them but in a society so narcissistic it’s to be expected. I wonder how many of our long dead vets if they saw what the society they had fought for had become, might have had 2nd thoughts about defending it?

Is light dawning on marble head?

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If the Democrats aren’t scared of stuff like this they should be, but then again as long as their paid machine cronies are counting the votes in black area they will be able to disenfranchise black republican votes as they did in the days of Jim Crow.

Don’t think for a minute they won’t try.

I note the daily beast interviewed Eric Idle and John Cleese for the 50th anniversary of Monty Python and they of course had plenty to say against those of us who support Trump

“It’s been quite clear to me from the very beginning that he is not mentally balanced,” Cleese says of Trump. “He is an extraordinary caricature of an asshole; a person who has no interest in anyone else except himself. Every time he makes a decision, no matter how impulsive it is, it’s the one that makes him feel best about himself for the next 20 minutes.

Contrast that statement with the one above it and your irony meter will explode.

That doesn’t make him and them any brilliant when it comes to comedy.

One more Python quote from Eric Idle on Trump that made me laugh

Idle admits that, during a break from his busy schedule, he recently became addicted to MSNBC.
“The problem is, the way they cover everything, you constantly think, ‘They’ve got him!’” he says of the coverage of Trump’s travails. “Like they’re coming for him with the handcuffs. The golden handcuffs, of course.”

reminds me of a song…

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Funny how Trump the supposedly Nazi/Racist dictator isn’t censoring them?

Finally This whole conversation is a pet peeve of mine:

Ms. Zideyah said that she and many of the women who attended the Ignite training were aware that they had to be careful about their social media posts, but worrying about what was stored on their phones was new.
“As an online human, you don’t think that those kinds of things are going to be used against you or leaked, especially from people that are closest to you,” Ms. Zideyah said. “But I do think that now that sort of training has to be implemented, because what you should keep on a phone is becoming a serious issue.”

via hot air headlines.

I’ve been saying this for decades but let’s try one more time.

Don’t put any image or thoughts on a phone or an email or a computer or any device that a computer is linked to that you would be ashamed to show to your grandmother.

I used to say “from your mother” but where you do think this generation got that idicoy from?

Fall of Berlin Wall anniversary offers lessons for misguided millennials

Posted: November 10, 2019 by John Ruberry in culture, education, entertainment, News/opinion, politics
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Blogger next to Berlin Wall slab at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in 2018

By John Ruberry

Saturday was the thirtieth anniversary of one of the most profound events of the 20th century, the fall of the Berlin Wall. What began as a bureaucratic slip became a people power moment as oppressed East Germans stormed the wall checkpoints and with the help of West Berliners, literally began hacking away on what Winston Churchill called “the wall of shame.”

It was also a wall of failure. The smartest and most gifted people of communist East Germany were more likely to seek freedom and prosperity in the West. The brain drain threatened the stability of East Germany, so after receiving permission from his fellow dictator, the USSR’s Nikita Krushchev, Walter Ulbricht ordered construction of the wall in the summer of 1961.

Just a few days ago Dennis Prager explained on his show that there is a difference between a dictatorship and a totalitarian state. Augosto Pinochet’s Chile was a brutal nation in the 1970s, but if you didn’t like it, you could leave Chile. Not so in the USSR, until its final days, where my wife was born, or in the absurdly-named German Democratic Republic. East Germans who tried to escape to West Berlin would have to conquer not just the wall, but also beds of nails, attack dogs, and barbed wire, as well as avoid sharpshooters in watch towers. The number of people killed attempting to escape in the 28-year existence of the wall is disputed–about 200 is a common estimate.

Of growing up in the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, Mrs. Marathon Pundit told me this morning when I was discussing this post, “We were slaves, really.”

Meanwhile, a YouGov poll released last week shows that over one-third of millennials approve of communism, which betrays the failure of our schools and universities that seem much more interested promoting the 56 genders and waving their fingers at guys like me over “white privilege.” Oh, the founders of the communist movement, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were white dudes. As were the earliest communists in power, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Leon Trotsky. All five of them came from middle class or wealthy backgrounds. They had white privilege.

OK, millennials!

The lessons of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the evils of Nazism obviously should never be forgotten. But what is overlooked by schools and society are the murderous regimes of Stalin (20 million killed, maybe more), Mao Zedong (65 million killed, maybe more). and Cambodia’s Pol Pot (1.5 million killed and perhaps more, roughly 20 percent of that nation’s population).

Another 30th anniversary involving a repressive communist regime passed this summer–the Tianammen Square protests in China that ended in the slaughter of pro-democracy activists. For 24 straight weeks there have been pro-Democracy protests in Hong Kong. The more things change…

Ulbricht and his successors’ East Germany didn’t have the high death count, but it excelled in mental torture. Its KGB was the Ministry of State Security, commonly known as the Stasi, whose goal was to “know everything about everyone.” Two movies are essential viewing for millennials–actually for everyone–to learn more about East Germany. Both of them are available on Netflix, Karl Marx City, a documentary, and The Lives of Others, an Academy Award winner for Best International Feature Film. Fittingly, The Lives of Others is set in the year 1984.

Apologists for communism regularly point out that the reason these Marxist regimes failed is that the wrong people were in charge and “real communism” has never been tried. It is they who are wrong. People in power, for the most part, have one thing in common. They want even more power.

There are exceptions of course. King George III asked an American what George Washington would do now that he had defeated the British Empire. When told that the general would return to his farm, the king replied, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”

Is that lesson being taught in many American schools? I doubt it.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

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