Archive for the ‘media’ Category

The Virginia #2a Tweet Awards!

Posted: January 21, 2020 by datechguy in culture, media, News/opinion, politics, special events
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Thanks to a combination of a left arm still unable to shovel, a wife deserving a good night’s sleep, the need for additional confession and weekly scheduled adoration I found myself away from my laptop until nearly 2 pm yesterday meaning that the 1st report I had as to what was going on in Richmond Virginia at the 2nd Amendment Rally came from my son repeating what his ultra liberal friend(s) were sending him him about White Supremacists etc when I picked up up just after noon. I told him at the time that because his friends resided in the liberal bubble their information was unlikely to be accurate or complete which proved to be prophetic when we finally got home after picking up DaWife and finally getting to sources of info that were not being censored by youtube or pre-written by folks trying to advance a meme rather that write news.

The 1st clue to the truth of this came at lunch with CNN as usual in the background on one TV at our favorite lunch haunt (the one drawback to the place). The lack of live coverage and breathless headlines during our meal demonstrated that all was not going as the media expected.

It also demonstrated the value of conservatives not abandoning Twitter as it became an excellent avenue to disseminate reality to people who wished to deny it as the 2nd Amendment march in the former 2nd Capital of the Confederacy turned out to be typical of tea party events that I had covered for many years while foiling every hope of a left media breathlessly waiting to proclaim a Charlottesville or a Kent State.

So today let’s look at five of those tweets and my responses that in my opinion illustrated the events of the day so well.

Don’t touch that Play Button, Part 1

Twitter is in many ways a lazy medium where many people will send a tweet with a link and video and people will either not click the video or follow the link allowing you to make any meme you want stick. That strategy however fails pretty miserably if people do

There are few things less frightening that a video of people walking down the street doing absolutely nothing threatening

Don’t Touch that Play Button 2

If you’re going to be a blue checked NBC reporter tweeting out clips of chants at a live event it does behoove you to match the chant with the clip you claim to be tweeting out to make the media’s contention that unlike bloggers you have layers of fact checkers credible.

The Scott Brown Election Night Memorial Clip

The saddest look I ever saw on the MSM’s face was the election night when Scott Brown won in Massachusetts but this one wasn’t all that far off. it’s even worse when the 1st guy interviewed is named Manny Cruz. Maybe he’s one of those “White Hispanics”. Anderson Cooper was even more taken aback here

His face says it all it looks like he’s going to throw up.

DaTechGuy’s Laws of Media outrage in Action

Nothing gets a story demoted faster on a MSM webpage than a Democrat/media narrative that is unmet by reality.

Moment of Accidental MSM/Left Clarity #1

Don’t you dare get the idea that the right isn’t violence just because there wasn’t any. Yeah there was no violence by the right, but that’s only because the tolerant and noble left wasn’t there to cause it!

Moment of Accidental MSM/Left Clarity #2

I remember covering a big tea party event during the 2012 primaries in NH that some expected trouble at. There was a single cop and not a harsh word to be said. The police at these events know when they’re in danger and when they’re not

I am the Ghost of Teaparties Past

Maybe Baltimore or SF can invite these folks to rally for gun right there. It will save them millions from their sanitary budget.

600 miles away the crime wave begins…

Why do I have the feeling channel 7 Boston would have been highlighting something different if the narrative had been met?

We’re all gonna die! Again!

One of the problems of constantly predicting doom a/la Peter Cook in the Secret Policeman’s Other Ball over the course of several years is that when voters who expected to be imprisoned, starving or living in a state of anarchy surrounded by the dead tend to notice when on election day they find themselves with good jobs in a booming economy on election day with nary a body in sight.

Meanwhile back in Bubble World…

My son’s friend’s likely only source of news but in fairness somewhere in the multiverse this reality might exist, perhaps in the same reality where the Crisis on Infinite Networks Letterkenny & the Witcher crossover is taking place.

The “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” award

Or, if you can’t get the nonviolent ordinary citizens who are opposing you to display the violence you insisted was inherent in their system you might as well blame said lack of violence on your decisive actions and forethought.

They mentioned the fence the Governor put up in that clip and I’ll close with a tweet commenting on that.

9th surprise, Adam Who? CNN as Tragedy, CNN as Comedy and two SB stats Under the Fedora

Posted: January 20, 2020 by datechguy in media, News/opinion, nfl, politics, Sports
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If you want to know why the left is so afraid of Donald Trump this headline says it all:

9th Circuit Dismisses Climate Change Lawsuit Brought By Kids

The idea that a federal court would dismiss a frivolous lawsuit is in general not all that odd a thing, but that the 9th circuit, the historical court of liberal insanity is doing so is a sign of the difference Donald Trump is making.

This was the fun story of the week.

Let’s point out that Congressman Schiff was on TV constantly, the media was pushing him constantly, newspapers were mentioning him constantly and three contestants on Jeopardy, the folks who know everything about everything had no idea who the hell he was, even with a picture. included.

That’s how little impeachment means to the public.

Speaking of things nobody cares about the media outrage over Senator McSally putting media hack Manu Raju in his place is really funny:

Given the abysmal ratings of CNN these days, the complete disintest by the country in impeachment and the low opinion the press is currently held while their anger is in fact a “tale told by an idiot” or rather idiots and does “signify nothing” I don’t think it their whining rises to the level of being “full of sound and fury” although it is full of something.

I’m really enjoying all of the outrage by the Bernie Sanders fans and others over CNN as being biased:

The big loser of the night was the network that hosted the event. CNN was so consistently aligned against Bernie Sanders that it compromised its claim to journalistic neutrality.

That’s from that well known right wing bastion the Nation in fact some Bernie sites are taking direct action:

A Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) subreddit has banned all content from CNN over the network’s coverage of the presidential candidate.

A moderator with the r/SandersForPresident subreddit, which has more than 373,000 members, announced the decision on Wednesday following the presidential debate in Des Moines, Iowa.

The post argues that CNN, which hosted Tuesday evening’s debate, has “abandoned their journalistic integrity” in an effort to derail Sanders’ campaign.

The level of outrage is really amusing as much worse than all of this is the kind of treatment that any conservative who isn’t willing to attack conservatives is subjected to daily.

Of course the Sanders crew has never been outraged over this kind of behavior as long as it’s directed at conservatives, but the idea that they might be the target, is beyond the pale.

cue the Troll in chief

Point and laugh time.

Finally it’s the Chiefs vs the 49ers in the Superbowl in two weeks. Basically an unstoppable offense vs an impenetrable defense but there are two stats that I find amusing going into this game

Stat 1: Going into the playoffs there were four QB’s in the playoffs that are locks for the hall of fame. Brees, Brady, Rogers and Wilson. Only Rogers made it to the final four and none of them made it to the big game suggesting this will be the passing of the torch.

Stat 2: If San Francisco wins this will be Jimmy G’s 3rd Superbowl ring as he won two with the Pats, one as a backup all season and the other starting a pair of games without losing one (he gone by the time they lost to the Eagles) that will put him at a full half Brady and he’s just getting started.

Review of the Netflix series Thieves of the Wood

Posted: January 19, 2020 by John Ruberry in culture, entertainment, media
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By John Ruberry

Are you missing some Robin Hood in your life? If you are a Netflix subscriber and you can stomach graphic violence, including torture, as well as gratuitous nudity, then you may want to take a look at the ten-episode Belgian series Thieves of the Wood, which began streaming earlier this month.

And you must be patient. Thieves of the Wood moves slowly, and if you don’t know about Jan de Lichte or Flanders of the 18th century, as I didn’t until a few days ago, you might get lost.

After watching the first episode I was indeed lost. So I got on my iPad where I learned that Jan de Lichte was a real person, a highway man, who of course robbed from the rich. After all, stealing from the poor is never very profitable. At the beginning of that first episode, de Lichte (Matteo Simoni) is being dragged on a sandy trail by mounted Austrian troops, he’s accused of murder and desertion. Now is the time to bring some historical perspective. Most of contemporary Flanders, a Dutch speaking region, lies in Belgium. But in the 1740s this region was then part of Austria although it was occupied by France. Historians call this conflict the War of Austrian Succession.

De Lichte escapes. He returns to his hometown of Aalst, which is run by corrupt Flemish aristocrats, led by Mayor Coffijn (Dirk Roofthooft). Just as de Lichte arrives in Aalst, so does the new bailiff, that is the chief of police, Jean-Phillipe Baru (Tom Van Dyck). Both learn that punishment is harsh in Aalst. Baru is horrified when he learns that a man and a woman are about to be flogged for the crime of stealing two rabbits from Coffijn’s estate, then branded–while their children watch. Now paperless, they are exiled from the city to live in a nearby forest.

Those woods are not the Nottingham Forest of Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood. The refuge is overrun by abject poverty, disease, prostitution, and opium smoking. De Lichte, aided by his half-brother Tincke (Stef Aerts), organize the downtrodden to fight back against the oppression, although it’s not until the fourth episode–I did say that Thieves of the Wood requires patience–that their plans bear fruit.

The loot is shared. Everyone wins in the forest. While Coffijn seethes

The scriptwriters are clearly hostile to the Catholic church. There is no Friar Tuck in this forest, in the town presides an imperious priest, Picke. He reminded me of the cruel Lutheran bishop in Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. 

As the series played out to me I fully expected a Donald Trump reference or two, especially since America comes up in the dialogue a couple of times. Then it hit me. Two of the town council members, including Mayor Coffijn, wear orange, or I should of course say red, periwigs. Perhaps that’s only a coincidence. Perhaps not. 

Some of the good: The costumes of Thieves of the Wood, including those wigs, are first-rate and the cinematography is superb. 

And now some of the bad: There are no subtitles, the Dutch dialogue instead is dubbed by British actors. The American entertainment industry suffers from the false premise that we won’t watch subtitled offerings. But last night I saw the Korean film Parasite, which is subtitled. Not only is Parasite an Academy Award nominee for Best Picture (and Best International Feature Film), but it is also performing very well in the domestic box office. Deservedly so, I’d like to add. 

Thieves of the Wood is rated TV-MA for reasons I listed above. 

John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.

America’s Greatest Enemy is Not a Physical One

Posted: January 18, 2020 by julietteochieng in media, Uncomfortable Truths, war
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But I repeat myself

by baldilocks

David Solway: 

Writing the book forced me to undertake relentless scrutiny of the values and beliefs I’d accepted as gospel and to realize that I had thoughtlessly succumbed to an all-encompassing lie fostered by the media, the academy, and the political left. Intellectually speaking, I had thought I was pole-vaulting; instead, I was doing the limbo. Almost every statement I’d read about American treachery, Israeli apartheid, the “religion of peace,” feminist grievance, global warming, right-wing extremism, the ironhanded Patriarchy, oppression of minorities, and the rest was an outright lie and functioned as aspects of what Quentin Skinner in From Humanism to Hobbes called “the potentially ruinous impact of rhetorical redescription,” that is, reframing something that is not the case as emphatically and undeniably the case. (…)

I finally began to understand that what I’d taken for history was nothing but ideology and what I’d thought was truth was an order-of-magnitude lie. And that my political and cultural preceptors were, to a man and a woman, professional liars.

Everything I’ve learned since I began paying attention has only served to confirm my conviction that we are living in unique times, an era in which lies come so thick and fast it seems like one is dodging bullets. It makes no difference where we turn, the lie is there. And we have credulously absorbed it as indisputable fact.

We Christians are familiar—some only passingly familiar–with Jesus’ assertion that the Devil is the Father of Lies. That is, he is the progenitor of everything that is false. Let’s stipulate that and go further: he is the architect and builder of Lies.

God is building His kingdom, and so the Adversary is building his.

This adversary does deal in simple falsehoods, but those aren’t his most lethal weapons. He is an imitator of his enemy, God, and therefore, his deceptions are high, wide, deep, broad, complex — and, long-term.

These types of deceptions are four-dimensional at the very least; they are his weapons of mass destruction.

I’ve pointed this out before.

Solway again.

Nearly all the political news we get is Fake News, disseminated by a media conglomerate that constitutes the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party in the U.S. and the Liberal Party in my own country. The media are proof positive that the political and cultural left has completed its long march through the institutions.

I kept reading to see if Solway came to the same conclusion that I did.

Pay-dirt:

We need to recognize that these “kings” have built a world of lies so massive and infusorial that we have been unwittingly conscripted into its dominion. We must somehow expose this bogus world and return to the real one, we must be wakeful rather than woke, though I’m afraid the struggle may now be Sisyphean. (…)

As M. Scott Peck reminds us in People of the Lie, “the only power that Satan has is through human belief in its [Satan’s] lies,” a belief consistent with lack of empathy, the failure of introspection and the inability to distrust oneself. This leads to the further question of whether evil lives in the human spirit or is a factor in the objective world. As Peck remarks, “Perhaps it will forever be impossible to totally discern exactly where the human Shadow leaves off and the Prince of Darkness begins.”

You’ll want to read Solway’s entire essay … and the late M. Scott Peck’s People of the Lie.

Juliette Akinyi Ochieng has been blogging since 2003 as baldilocks. Her older blog is here.  She published her first novel, Tale of the Tigers: Love is Not a Game in 2012.

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