Archive for the ‘culture’ Category

The Dear School of Experience Visits A Survivor of Kibbutz Nir Oz 

Posted: December 15, 2023 by datechguy in culture, Israel, Israel vs Hamas, Uncategorized
Tags: , , , ,

K’Mtar: [Alexander has just dropped an opponent in the Holodeck] Po’tajg! Po’tajg! Finish him. [Alexander drops his bat’leth and walks away. The Hologram Klingon gets up knife ready to kill him from behind] Freeze program. [To Alexander] You should have killed him when you had the chance.
Lt. Worf: Why did you not?
Alexander: I don’t know.
K’Mtar: Look at him! He did not care that you showed him mercy. He was going to kill you.
Lt. Worf: K’mtar, that is enough.
K’Mtar: If this was real, he’d be dead by now. 

Star Trek TNG Firstborn 1994 via chakoteya.net

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.

Ben Franklin Poor Richard Almanack 1758

Yesterday I talked about the problem of Gaza post Hamas, over at the daily links at Elder of Ziyon I saw this story and video that emphasizes that problem, a story that is both heartbreaking and maddening

“We thought that Palestinians are good people. All they want is peace and prosperity,” Lahav told the Washington Free Beacon in an interview from a hotel in this Red Sea resort city where she and most of her community were temporarily relocated. “It’s just that Hamas is forcing them to be in this aggressive situation.”

When terrorists first shook the door of her safe room on Oct. 7, Lahav was sure that she and her 22-year-old daughter were about to be killed. But a makeshift lock she had fashioned out of an oar and a vacuum cleaner thwarted three separate break-in attempts. The women lay in the darkened room for about 10 hours listening to sounds of automatic gunfire and grenade explosions. At one point, they heard a group of teenagers robbing their house.

Later, Lahav learned from other Nir Oz survivors that Gazan women and children as young as 10 years old had followed Hamas terrorists into the kibbutz, looting, helping the armed terrorists, and apparently enjoying themselves.

Here is the video

It’s heartbreaking because better than one in four of the people in her Kibbutz were killed or kidnapped. But it’s also maddening because this woman is in her 60’s and the evidence during her entire life has been that the Palestinians have wanted them dead, have cheered when terror attacks had taken place and only saw the Israeli peace camp as useful idiots to be exploited.

Yet it took the slaughter of her neighbors for her to learn this lesson and the only reason she and her daughter lived long enough to learn that lesson was that her makeshift lock held out.

How many of her neighbors would still be alive today if they had learned that lesson before Oct 7th?

And let’s ask two more important question to folks here in the states, questions whose answers I believe are just as clear:

  1. How many of those protesting in the streets today in NYC, DC and elsewhere would kill the Jews they encounter here if they thought they could get away with it?
  2. Is there any reason to believe they would or will stop with the Jews when they are done

I submit and suggest that the answer to question 1 is “Yes” and the answer to question 2 is “No” and the only reason you will not likely see this happen in the US is that the citizens of this country are the most heavily armed civilian population in the world today, possibly in history.

Which explains why the left wants us disarmed.

May Israel grow wiser from these event and may the west profit from this horrible example. Finally to those who don’t think this could happen here, I wish you the best of luck, may the dear school of experience never take residence in your town.

Update: She wasn’t alone in her naïveté and her reeducation

Reverse the Religions in this Story and it’s National if not International News OR DaTechGuy’s 3rd Law of Media Outrage Strikes Again

Posted: December 13, 2023 by datechguy in culture, media
Tags: , , ,

Here is a story you likely won’t see on CNN

Police said a Nashville family is facing charges after police say they beat their son who recently converted from Islam to Christianity.

Nick Kadum, 57, Rawaa Khawaji, 46, and John Kadum, 29, were all charged in the incident.

Metro officers were dispatched to Amber Hills Lane on Tuesday to do a welfare check on the victim, who is a juvenile. When officers arrived, the victim appeared disheveled and cut haphazardly, police said. The victim had a scratch on the back of his right hand and several lumps on his face.

The victim told police his father, mother and brother attacked him because he had recently become a Christian and they are Muslims, who were disappointed in his change of religion, according to an arrest report.

“He stated (his mother), along with his brother and father, repeatedly punched him and spat in his face,” an officer stated in the report. “He stated his mother then took a knife and scratched the back of his right hand with it. He stated his family, including his mother, demanded he recant and say he was a Muslim.”

Now if the parents and family doing the beating and wielding the knife were Christian then CNN would be making this national news if not international news. You might even see protests on the streets in foreign capitals.

But alas they are Muslims so DaTechGuy’s 3rd law of media outrage applies:

The MSM’s elevation and continued classification of any story as Nationally Newsworthy rather than only of local interest is in direct correlation to said story’s current ability to affirm any current Democrat/Liberal/Media meme/talking point, particularly on the subject of race or sexuality.

thus this remains local news barely worth the short story that Nashville 4 gave it.

#Unexpectedly of courseTM

In fairness, Jesus did explicitly say this kind of thing was not only part of the job description

Brother will hand over brother to death, and the father his child; children will rise up against parents and have them put to death. You will be hated by all because of my name, but whoever endures to the end will be saved.

Matt 10:21,22

But part of the plan

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword. For I have come to set a man ‘against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s enemies will be those of his household.’

Matt 10:34-36

Varoom! Varoom! Review: Radical Wolfe

Posted: December 10, 2023 by John Ruberry in culture, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

By John Ruberry

For many Netflix subscribers, their focus is on the next week’s release of the second part of the final season of The Crown. While I have enjoyed the series, the first batch of Season Six of The Crown was a huge disappointment for me.

A more enjoyable use of your time–75 minutes to be precise–can be found by watching Radical Wolfe, a documentary about the legendary writer Tom Wolfe, a pioneer of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s who later, and seamlessly, made the transition into fiction, penning one of the greatest novels ever, The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Radical Wolfe, which had a brief theatrical run this autumn, is directed by Richard Dewey. It is filled with interviews of Wolfe; Jon Hamm narrates passages from Wolfe’s work. The documentary is based on an Esquire article by Michael Lewis.

Gay Talese, Tom Junod, Christopher Buckley, and Lewis are among the writers interviewed for Radical Wolfe.

Buckley’s father, conservative firebrand William F. Buckley, says here. “Tom Wolfe is probably the most skillful writer in America. I mean by that is that he can do more things with words than anyone else.”

“If you want to be a writer,” Wolfe, who died in 2018 said of himself, “you’ve got to be standing in the middle of the tracks to see how fast the train goes.”

“Nobody is writing like Tom Wolfe today,” Junod says in Radical Wolfe. “And no one has written like Tom Wolfe.”

Wolfe is someone America needs now. Oh, to have seen him running loose among the hypocrites at COP28.

The title of the film comes from Wolfe’s 1970 essay for New York magazine, Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s, when Wolfe, after co-opting an invitation to a fundraiser for bail money for some Black Panthers held at Leonard Bernstein’s Park Avenue home, skewered the liberal virtue signaling culture, even before that term existed.

Oh yeah, phrases. Phrases!!! Besides “radical chic,” Wolfe coined the terms “the right stuff,” the title of his of his rollicking yet informative bestseller about the early days of the space program, and “masters of the universe,” the group that Sherman McCoy, the lead character in The Bonfire of the Vanities, placed himself in. 

Not mentioned in the documentary while Wolfe didn’t create the now-common phrase “pushing the envelope,” which is used repeatedly in The Right Stuff, he popularized it.

Wolfe began his career as a who-what-where when-why–journalist in the northeast. After convincing Esquire in the early 1960s to let him write an article about the California custom car culture, Wolfe suffered writer’s block. Which was the best thing, career-wise, that ever happened to the author. Eventually the floodgates opened, Wolfe brought sound effects to print journalism, shown in the title of that piece, There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored (Thphhhhhh!) Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Rahghhh!) Around the Bend (Brummmmmmmmmmmmmmm)…

The repeated use of ellipses (…) and multiple exclamation points (!!!) are a trademark of Wolfe’s early work.

As with the fetid film version of The Bonfire of the Vanities, Radical Wolfe tiptoes around race. Wolfe was a master storyteller and, strictly in the storytelling sense, race presents a crucial ingredient for any narrative–conflict. The Reverend Bacon character in Bonfires, an Al Sharpton knockoff, is a comic foil. Fareek “The Cannon” Fanon, an African American college football star in Wolfe’s 1998 novel, A Man in Full, comes across as a boor when he confuses lead character Charlie Coker’s old moniker as a 60-Minute Man, not as a football starter on both defense and offense, but as a man who could, let’s say, “do it” in bed for 60 minutes.

Black people can be boors in Wolfe’s world. As can white people. As can everyone. That’s the way it ought to be. Because that’s the way society is.

In Wolfe’s takedown of ugly glass-box and faceless architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House, he gives a rundown of the horrors of public housing, and joyously recalls the response when tin-eared bureaucrats in St. Louis–after decades of failing the residents of the city’s housing projects–finally did the unthinkable. They asked the tenants of the notorious Pruitt-Igoe homes, most of them Black, what they wanted done to the buildings. Their response? They chanted, “Blow it up.”

And the bureaucrats did just that. Why isn’t this poignant story in Radical Wolfe?

Wolfe was always coy about his political stance. “I belong to the party of the opposition,” he says in the documentary. But I suspect he was a slightly conservative, with a strong libertarian bent.

Despite the quibbles I mentioned, I loved Radical Wolfe. Oh, one more thing. To capture the Varoom!!! Varoom!!! uniqueness of Wolfe’s genius, a surreal mashup, along the lines of the one in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, would have been a welcome addition.

Last year, Netflix sent a message to its workers that not all of its programming–not these words of course–will kowtow to wokeism. Radical Wolfe is a big step in the right direction for the streaming service. Next year Netflix will stream a six-episode limited series based on Wolfe’s A Man in Full. It will star Jeff Daniels and Diane Lane.

Keep it up, Netflix.

But I have one more quibble. Radical Wolfe is rated TV-MA for–wait for it–language and smoking.

Really? TV-MA?

Yep.

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

Four Reasons Why Nobody Should Be Surprised at Gay, Kornbluth and Magill Answers under Oath

Posted: December 7, 2023 by datechguy in culture, education, Israel
Tags: , , , , , ,

Jedediah Tucker Ward: It’s not hypothetical to Dr. Pavel, he wrote it.

Michael Grazier: So he says.

Jedediah Tucker Ward: So he says under oath.

Class Action 1991

There are three reasons why we should not be surprised at either the testimony of these “ladies” who are running elite colleges concerning calling for the genocide of Jews

or the sudden volte face when no longer under oath from Penn

and Harvard

Let’s take them in Order

1. Under Oath

You see when under oath you are in a position that there are sanctions for lying so as long as they were under oath they didn’t want to assert something that would have been provably false. Particularly with GOP representatives ready to call them out on it.

But once they were no longer under oath, they could make any assertion they wanted without fear of the law.

2. Support for Antifa & BLM

The second reason is less legalistic. At colleges all over the country we have seen people support and even join in on the looting and torching of American cities since 2018. We have seen such actions defended and even promoted by groups on campus with facility and administration giving very public support to such things.

Given those facts how could they credibly claim that such statements are violations the policies of their universities.

3. He Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune:

The third reason is a bit more mercenary and can be summarized in one word: CASH:

Over 200 US universities including elite institutions Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been accused of raking in $13 billion in “undocumented contributions from foreign governments,” according to a new report.

A sizable portion of the funds were said to be donated from authoritarian regimes around the globe including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, China and the UAE, the report from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) claimed.

Furthermore consider this:

I’ll say this for these universities, when someone buys them they stay bought.

4. No Enemies on the Left

Finally let’s look at a simple reality.

If I walked onto the campus of Harvard, or MIT, or Penn or frankly almost any university in Massachusetts and sat down to pray my Rosary with a sign next to me that said:

  1. There are two genders
  2. Transgenderism is a form of mental illness
  3. Marriage is between a man and a woman

I would likely at best be escorted forcibly off campus and at worst surrounded and attacked by a raging mob of leftists with no consideration of my 1st Amendment rights. After all I’m a conservative Catholic who actually believes

But the reality is that those people who are screaming “From the River to the Sea” and calling for the death of Jews are reliable votes for Democrats and for all the failings of modern Universities they can do the Ghastly Tom Hagen Math:

Right now the left has the Gays and the Transgenders and the Hollywood elites & media in which they are overrepresented and they figure that’s the best things to have, but in America Islam is a thing of the future.  In 20 years the children of Muslims now being raised on the tenets of Sharia law in America will be old enough to vote and Democrats going to make sure they get those votes when the time come, not now but 10-20 years from now.

It’s only been seven years since I wrote those words but they are certainly coming true.

Frankly if they wanted to deflect the question all they would have had to say, is something like:

“While I and the university find such speech horrific as long as it’s just speech it’s not actionable under the Constitution. The first amendment doesn’t have an exception for ‘evil'”.

Alas for them, such a statement would be the source of many lawsuits for all those who have been cancelled, fired and harassed over the last few years for having mainstream conservative opinions.

The left never expels useful idiots until their usefulness is over.

Older Entries
Newer Entries