Archive for the ‘culture’ Category

9/11 Silence, Election? What Election? Pizza? Please, Antonio Brown Suit, Playing it out Under the Fedora.

Posted: September 13, 2019 by datechguy in Always look at the bright side of Trump, baseball, culture, elections, politics, Sports, under the fedora
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You’ll note that I didn’t do anything to commemorate 9/11 this year at all, not even the great victory on Lake Champlain in 1814 that I’ve occasionally mentioned.

I think constantly morning the dead in big ceremonies is a bad idea while we are still fighting any of these guys, all it does it give hope to our foes. Granted we are closer than we’ve ever been to them being utterly crushed, but till I think a smaller ceremony is a better idea.

Some might object and that’s your right but my take is a lot better than the NYT trying to pretend that airplanes attacks us on their own.

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Speaking on 9/11 the MSM hit Donald Trump for hitting them on 9/11. I’m not surprised, it sure beats having to report on the special election in NC where they were anticipating victory for weeks, until the President showed up the day before.

Then the 18 point deficit became a 1 1/2 point win for Dan Bishop and the media was no longer smiling

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

and election suddenly was no longer newsworthy.

Unexpectedly of course.

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Ok one more 9/11 thing can someone please tell me what was so offensive about this pizza? that it couldn’t be tweeted out on 9/11?

It’s one thing to want to be respectful, it’s another thing to be anal. This is anal.

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Antonio Brown is now been accused of rape in a civil lawsuit alleging that these events took place last year and in 2017.

I have no idea if this is true or not and I’m sure this is going to be topic #1 on sports media concerning the NFL, and frankly Brown’s statement concerning the event doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in him, but regardless of how you feel about Brown who is likely one of the least popular players in the league at the moment, it seems to me that this is well within the statue of limitations so I don’t understand why the person launching this suit is not filing criminal charges in addition to the civil suit.

Whatever your opinion of Mr. Brown I think that’s a valid question that deserves an answer.

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As of this writing (9/11) the Boston Redsox tragic number for wild card spot elimination is 9. On the radio two days ago the I heard a sports talk guy say the day they were official eliminated by the Yankees for the division that you would see the players tone it down. This suggestion insults me for two reasons.

Firstly until you eliminated. Teams have been known to collapse at the end so until you’re out of it you should play like you’re in it, not just for the your own team and fan’s sake but to force the guys in front of you earn it.

Secondly as professional athletes who are paid millions of dollars to play this game you are expected to play to win. This is entertainment and in a sport whose fan base isn’t what it was you can’t afford to mail it in.

Of course it would be nice if the players were as insulted by this suggestion as I was.

Israel’s Jews Mugged by Reality

Posted: September 12, 2019 by datechguy in crime, culture, Israel, middle east

The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality. Thus if you had been trying to damn your man by the Romantic method…you would try to protect him at all costs from any real pain; because, of course, five minutes’ genuine toothache would reveal the romantic sorrows for the nonsense they were and unmask your whole stratagem.

C.S. Lewis Screwtape 13

General Calvet: I have soup with every meal because I remember when I had no soup

Sharpe’s Siege 1996

There was a fascinating piece in the NYT about a movie called Born in Jerusalem and Still alive and how the perspective given in that film reflects the politics of Israel today.

The opening scene of “Born in Jerusalem and Still Alive,” which just won the prize for best first feature at the Jerusalem Film Festival, catches the main character grimacing as he overhears a glib tour guide. When she describes downtown Jerusalem to her group as “beautiful,” the “center of night life and food for the young generation,” Ronen, an earnest man in his late 30s, interrupts.
“Don’t believe her,” he tells the tourists in Hebrew-accented English. “You see this market? Fifteen years ago it was a war zone. Next to my high school there was a terror attack. Next to the university there was a terror attack. First time I made sex — terror attack.” One of the tourists sidles over, interested. “Yes,” Ronen tells her, “we had to stop.”
No single episode has shaped Israel’s population and politics like the wave of suicide bombings perpetrated by Palestinians in the first years of the 21st century. Much of what you see here in 2019 is the aftermath of that time, and every election since has been held in its shadow. The attacks, which killed hundreds of Israeli civilians, ended hopes for a negotiated peace and destroyed the left, which was in power when the wave began. Any sympathy that the Israeli majority had toward Palestinians evaporated.

While the piece itself was interesting and hit a nerve with me what really caught my eye were some of the comments. Usually you can count on the NYT comments section to be fairly insane arguments, albeit with excellent grammar and this one was no exception, but it produced a few gems and one of these stood out to me. I quote it in full. (all emphasis mine)

I am 73, and remember this period very well. A few points.

1) The Intifadas don’t come up in conversation in Israel more – or less – than the other wars. They are part of common knowledge. For 3 years I drove my teenage daughter everywhere, even the mall, so she wouldn’t use a bus. I never knew if she was coming back in a new blouse or in a body bag.

2) The numbers (according to B’ Tzelem): 84 Israelis killed in the First Intifada, 1011 in the second. A minority were military and security personnel.

3) What turned off the Left – me included – from any fantasies of a negotiated peace was not the outrages themselves, but the popular celebrations that followed them. “Successful” outrages, such as bus bombings with 20+ dead, were celebrated in Palestine streets with music, dancing, burning cardboard Israeli buses and giving away sweets, like in a wedding. We got it: Oslo was a scam.

4) The two countries we have peace treaties with – Jordan and Egypt – were and are military dictatorships, whose rulers understood that “if you can’t lick’em, sign a peace treaty till you can”. Peace there is top-down. Israeli tourists, businesses, performers, clients, etc. – are not welcome in those countries to this day, decades after the signings.

5) So our only hope for a marginally normal life is to withdraw unilaterally to UN-sanctioned borders (as in Lebanon or Gaza), and always make sure we have enough firepower to prevent anyone from thinking it was an act of weakness.

This is the story in a nutshell. For all their cries of “apartheid walls” and oppression the reality is that if you are a Palestinian who has no interest in killing Jews and just want to live your life neither the Jewish state in general nor individual Jews in general or Israeli’s in particular are a danger to you.

The reverse has not been true and frankly has never been true.

As I’ve written before if Israel wanted the Palestinian’s dead any time in the last twenty years they could have exterminated them with ease (particularly after the fall of their patron the Soviet Union). The difference between Israel and their Arab neighbors is if said neighbors had the power to exterminate the jews they would without hesitation, while the Jews have had this power for decades and choose not to do so, and in fact even provide medical services to them, even when they cheer.

I had to say it. You’re incredible. You take everyone, you treat everyone, no one goes first, no one goes last, you just go in order of who needs help. That’s, like, Mother Teresa stuff. “We’re not saints, we’re just doing our jobs. It’s not easy, I admit. And it gets hard when they cheer when the bodies are brought in.” I looked at her. What did you say? She sighed. “Yes, it gets hard when they cheer.” This was one of the times during my trip when I held up my hands and said, “Stop. Wait.” I turned and walked away to breathe deeply for a minute.

There is an old saying that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. That is a perfect description of the Israeli left. The random slaughter of the intifadas are still in living memory and as long as that memory exists the left’s ability to twist reality isn’t effective.

This is why this film is important and why Bibi keeps winning re-election. The Israeli’s have learned the lesson that the American people in general and American Jews in particular have not and have decided they are not going to commit suicide so people in other countries at cocktail parties can feel good about themselves. They will have to wait until a generation is born that forgets.

#rephrased Joel Gilbert Will Tell the world what we Bloggers already know about Travon Martin

Posted: September 11, 2019 by datechguy in crime, culture, education, media, News/opinion
Tags:

Via Instapundit I read with some interest this story of an impending documentary that will infuriate the left:

Gilbert did some serious shoe leather reporting as well. He visited all the relevant Miami-area high schools, the neighborhoods where Martin and his friends hung out, the streets of Miami’s Little Haiti, and the town community where Martin died.
At the end of his research, Gilbert knew Trayvon Martin better than his parents did, literally. As their deposition revealed, they had no idea how Martin’s life had descended into a violent mix of street fighting, guns, drugs, burglary, and sex. Although both parents made good incomes, their separate lives created an abyss where a home should have been, and their once promising son fell straight to the bottom of it.
Unwilling to accept their own responsibility for his demise, they took the bait promised by the family attorneys and sweetened by the media and projected their guilt on to George Zimmerman. Although an Obama supporter and civil rights activist, the half-Hispanic Zimmerman proved to be just white enough to play the “racist” killer role in the unholy melodrama that followed.

He’s talking about the Travon Martin case which was before the Michael Brown case the biggest race card fraud that was played by the left in that it wasn’t at all about race but it was about .

It’s an interesting story, it’s a tragic story but most interestingly it’s a story that we bloggers told you years ago.

Stacy McCain told you about it at the American Spectator blog which we access via the wayback machine:

Either of those incidents could have put Trayvon Martin into the custody of the juvenile justice system. However, because of Chief Hurley’s attempt to reduce the school crime statistics — according to sworn testimony, officers were “basically told to lie and falsify” reports — Martin was never arrested. And if he had been arrested, he might never have been in Sanford the night of his fatal encounter with Zimmerman.

Pam Geller wrote about it:

Not only did the media and law enforcement cover up Trayvon Martin’s criminal record — the attack on Zimmerman and subsequent show trial brought systemic corruption to light and led to the takedown of senior officials.
Much thanks to Andrea Shea King, Pat Dollard and The Last Refuge (who has done yeoman’s work on this case):

the afore mentioned Pat Dollard wrote about it

This new SOP was outlined by a communications directive in 2010 forbidding the sharing of Miami-Dade School Police reports to outside agencies without redaction. Officers had to send any and all requests through the public information officer.
Hence, the furor of Chief Hurley when the Robles article hit the press and cited police reports – Hurley smelled a leaker and launched an investigation.
Ultimately the internal affairs investigation initiated by Hurley led to his own firing, because the officers questioned told the internal affairs investigators the truth of what was going on and outed the scheme.
One of the examples of this in action was the jewelry incident and Trayvon Martin – as accidentally outlined in the Herald report. But the Herald never knew their reporting had launched an internal affairs investigation which led to the collapse of the scheme.

Stacy McCain again (this time at his blog instead of the Spectator)

Part of the reason it was difficult to get that story across was that it wasn’t easy to explain. It’s a complex story and boiling it down to less than 700 words took me several hours, because I had to sort through a lot of stuff and double-check basic background facts. And here is the most important fact of the whole story:
TRAYVON MARTIN WAS NOT FROM SANFORD
The liberal media keep leaving that out, don’t they? And why do you think that is? Because if they told you he was from Miami Gardens, more than 240 miles from Sanford, then the media would have to explain why Trayvon was in Sanford the night of Feb. 26, 2012.
Sometimes, if you pull one thread of a story, the whole narrative unravels and this question — “Why was Trayvon in Sanford?” — is one that the liberal media don’t want to talk about.
This is how you know it’s probably the most important question of all.

Sundance at the Last Refuse did the heavy lifting for most of us:

The connections between the Police Burglary report and the School Report of “found items” were never made because the regular police detective in charge of the Burglary case had no idea the School Police Dept. had filed a “found items” report.
Two differing police departments, and the School Officer, Dunn, intentionally took the criminal element out of the equation – instead preferring “school discipline” and not “criminal adjudication”.
It was only when the M-DSPD Internal Affairs investigation kicked in, and six officers gave sworn affidavits, the manipulative scheme to improve criminal statistics within the School System were identified openly.
School Superintendent Alberto Carvalho gave his hire, Police Chief Hurley, instructions to reduce the criminal behavior of young black males. The chosen strategy between them, to insure optical success, was to stop using the Criminal Justice System to punish black student behavior. Instead they instructed the School Resource Officers to use school discipline in place of criminal justice.

This made a big enough splash that Rush Limbaugh talked about it:

So real crimes would be committed by students, not just Trayvon, and rather than being categorized as such they were just pushed over here into another column on the spreadsheet that said “disciplinary actions.”  So, at the end of the day, these reports made it look like that the school district and superintendent had really started kicking butt on crimes in the schools and had really reduced it, when they hadn’t whatsoever. 
The upshot is that criminal activity wasn’t punished.
It was barely even disciplined.
And so the perpetrators were never held to account, nor did they ever have to come to grips with the severity of their actions. 
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH:  So think about it.  In some schools you get thrown out for a long time for just drawing a picture of a gun.  But in Miami-Dade, you can commit real crimes and the school will cover-up for you to make their stats look better. 

And finally there was my own small contribution to the discussion:

I’m sure the city figured it was just easier to just let things go and I’m sure assuming his parents knew about it, they would have agreed.  A lot less trouble all around.
What could possibly go wrong?
If they did this, and Trayvon Martin still found himself on that fateful night watched by George Zimmerman I’m wondering how different might things have been.  If he had,  say, some kind of probation over his head might Trayvon Martin have   thought: “I don’t like that ass following me but I don’t want to risk any trouble right now.” and instead of turning back to confront George Zimmerman used the more than ample time he had to just go home?
We don’t know any of this but we do know this. If you have a school and police department gaming the system to improve the stats they are selling out the community who they work for, the schools and the kids, both those who got into trouble and those who don’t all for the sake of bragging rights.
How many more kids seeing the system being gained in this way by the authorities for their own gain will look at that, and decide they can do the same? How many will end up someday in trouble, in jail or dead because of it?

In short the facts that this film is going to discuss are already well known to to conservative writers, conservative thinkers and conservative bloggers as we discussed them half a decade ago.

But to media types who worry that the TV show Friends is too white to be discussed today these were facts to be suppressed and ignored and if you live in the left’s media bubble or only escaped it a few years ago these facts are completely unknown to you.

Why? because the left’s primary strategy in the Obama years was to weaponize race and that took precedence over the good of black youth like Travon Martin or the life of an Obama supporter who was completely expendable for that purpose.

That’s why I think this film the Trayvon Hoax is going to be important and that’s why the media will do all it can to suppress it or if they can’t destroy it.

Buttigieg on Scripture, The Chappelle add on, Rabbits Farmers Chanel Captain’s Courageous, Chick-Fil-A wins again, Maybe they’re all lunch? Under the Fedora

Posted: September 10, 2019 by datechguy in comedy, culture, dave chappelle, elections, entertainment, News/opinion, primaries, Uncategorized, under the fedora
Tags: ,

I have to disagree with this argument at PJ media on Pete Buttigieg on scripture. I think he understands scripture just as I think Andrew Sullivan understands scripture and Fr. James Martin does and the idea is the same.

He wants to remake scripture in general and God in particular in his own image in order to redefine sin because as I can tell you from personal experience it’s a hell of a lot easier to redefine sin to meet your behavior that to change your behavior to avoid sin.

One interesting thing about the Dave Chappelle special on Netflix is that there is a 2nd special that emphasis his close relationship with liberal icons.

Don’t think for one moment that it wasn’t included as insurance against cancel culture.

Didn’t work though.

I confess took too much pleasure from this story of a bunch of vegans getting beaten up by rabbit farmers when they tried to storm their locations and set their livestock free.

All I could think of was the famous scene from the Spencer Tracy move Captain’s Courageous that I’ve written about before when the wealthy brat whose been recused from the passenger liner that he fell overboard from keep disrupting the fishing schooner he’s on.

 Troop finally concludes: “I guess there’s nothing left for it.” He rears back and gives Harvey a slap that knocks him flat. Harvey for perhaps for the first time in his life doesn’t know what to say:
You HIT me!
“Now you just sit there and think about it.”
It is here, with the establishment of discipline, that the movie begins to shift.

I suggest those vegans just sit there and think about it.

When will the left learn that no matter how loud they are they aren’t going to change the fact that the number of people who like the taste of Chick-fil-a vastly outnumber the woke who show up for die ins?

Each one of these protests get a lot of media but it keeps getting bigger and bigger. But there’s STILL not one in Fitchburg!

Finally speaking of food something just struck me about this story concerning an academic who suggests we can save the planet by eating each other (in a non-sexual way of course).

For several years we have been teasing the least about all the people who have supposedly died from Donald Trump’s tax cuts, his dropping out of the Paris accords, his court appointments etc etc etc and have sarcastically asked, if all these people have been killed by Trump where are the bodies?

Now we know.

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