Archive for the ‘politics’ Category

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?

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

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…

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

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.

Why the Seattle City Counsel Election Result is bigger than the Virginia Statewide Results

Posted: November 10, 2019 by datechguy in elections, politics
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There has been a lot of fuss about the election in Virginia which gave the Democrats all three houses in the state and to be sure, they are significant but for my money the bigger story if the city council election in Seattle.

Virginia is propped up by national politics and by Democrats winning despite scandals involving both the Democrat Governor (Blackface business) and Lt. Gov (Sexual Assault). We are already seeing memes of Virginia becoming California west.

But this is still early and if the Democrats majority is not huge. All it will take is a little overreach and there is every possibility that voters, even anti-Trump one will look at these results in four years and decide the left is a bridge too far.

Seattle is VERY different.

We have already seen story after story of Seattle surrendering it’s streets to the mob, of it’s business’ closing or fleeing because of the environment for them and people not being safe in their own city.

Well they had a city counsel election recently, an election where quite a few folks had been crying “enough” and guess what happened?

Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant has nearly completed a stunning turnaround in her quest for a third term Friday evening, recovering from a deficit of more than 8 percentage points and taking a 1,515-vote lead over her opponent, Egan Orion — putting her up by 3.6 percentage points. 
At that margin, Sawant will almost certainly retain her seat.
After a disappointing result in the initial ballot drop on election night, Seattle’s most famous socialist has cleaned up in the votes tallied in subsequent days, winning around 60% of ballots that were either postmarked or left in drop boxes on election day.
Washington’s vote-by-mail system means some last-minute ballots take several days to count. With the late trend strongly favoring Sawant — part of a pattern in Seattle of late-counted ballots tilting left — and relatively few ballots remaining, her reelection is a near lock.
With Sawant’s apparent comeback win, an election that was cast by many as a referendum on the leftward lean of Seattle politics has almost completely backfired on the business groups and mainstream Democrats who spent millions in their effort to rein in the city’s progressives.

Now I have some shall we say doubts about the mail in systems and their integrity but even given that consider the following.

The decline of Seattle has not been a secret. It’s been a national story and actually reached the point where not just business but even local media had taken sides against the left:

The left loves to make Amazon the face of any opposition but it wasn’t just Amazon and the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce pushing for a more moderate City Council. As I pointed out this week, the Seattle Times editorial board was campaigning to oust the far left members as well, including Sawant.

Yet despite all of this Seattle has decided to stay the course.

This tells me that liberalism is such a religion for the People of Seattle that not even the realities of life under liberalism and it’s costs can counter their loyalty to it. They have achieved a San Francisco level of wokeness and will likely have to go far beyond that level of danger and insanity to get out of it. I instantly thought of Bill James description of Hal Chase after managed to get MLB to take his side on allegations of him throwing games.

“He was free, then. It had all be brought out into the open, and he had gotten by with it. This seems to have had a liberating effect on Chase’s activities”

What this means for Seattle in general and Kshama Sawant in particular is that they can rightly claim a licence by the voters most affected by their policies to go farther left. Seattle has gotten the government they deserve and the left is going to give it to them good and hard. If that doesn’t scare the hell out of every normal still living in the city it ought to.

If You’ve Ever Wondered Why I Never Got a Job in What Some Call “Actual Media”

Posted: November 6, 2019 by datechguy in dablog, elections, media, News/opinion, politics
Tags: ,

…It’s likely because I was willing to write about Jeffrey Epstein while stuff like this was going on.

Amy Robach, ‘Good Morning America’ Co-Host and Breaking News Anchor at ABC, explains how a witness came forward years ago with information pertaining to Epstein, but Disney-owned ABC News refused to air the material for years. Robach vents her anger in a “hot mic” moment with an off-camera producer, explaining that ABC quashed the story in it’s early stages.  “I’ve had this interview with Virginia Roberts (Now Virginia Guiffre) [alleged Epstein victim]. We would not put it on the air. Um, first of all, I was told “Who’s Jeffrey Epstein.  No one knows who that is.  This is a stupid story.”
She continues, “The Palace found out that we had her whole allegations about Prince Andrew and threatened us a million different ways.”
Robach goes on to express she believes that Epstein was killed in prison saying, “So do I think he was killed? 100% Yes, I do…He made his whole living blackmailing people… Yup, there were a lot of men in those planes. A lot of men who visited that Island, a lot of powerful men who came into that apartment.”
Robach repeats a prophetic statement purportedly made by Attorney Brad Edwards “…[T]here will come a day when we will realize Jeffrey Epstein was the most prolific pedophile this country has ever known,” and Disgustedly Robach states “I had it all three years ago.”

That’s via James O’Keefe and Project Veritas who had hot mic info that was so explosive that he actually activated a “dead man’s switch” to make sure that this came out in the event of his death.

It was so big that for once the MSM didn’t ignore what he was saying. ABC responded thus:

ABC News executives say their journalists were simply not able to corroborate the details of the reporting sufficiently for broadcast.
“We would never run away from that,” Chris Vlasto, head of investigations for ABC News, tells NPR. The network has filed approximately two dozen digital and broadcast stories on Epstein since early 2015, when ABC started talking to the accuser, Virginia Roberts Giuffre

For the sake of the few who might actually buy that argument let me remind you of something I wrote in 2014.

If there is one thing the media that loves to play the War on Women® card doesn’t want to touch it’s a story about people using their own private island to get laid that involves Bill Clinton.
What could the media do if this story involving the former father of the year? They would call it old news, not relevant, dirty tricks from a salacious lawsuit that doesn’t even involve him and an attack on Hillary that crosses the line. In fact the left will deploy a plethora of adjectives to discourage further discussion of this story from antiquated to zany, but there is one adjective that could not come out of their mouth to dismiss this story:
Unbelievable
The last few years have proven that the left can convince a low information voter of a lot of things, but even the full power of the mainstream media and the strongest zealots from the War on Women® brigade would not be able to convince the American public that Bill Clinton would have no interest or business on a private island where orgies took place.
That’s why you didn’t see this story in the news last month and why as the case moves forward you’ll not see it covered period.

And a piece I wrote during the 2016 campaign:

as I was watching Jake Tapper on Monday discussing this and the security implication of blackmail for the husband of a top aide of Hillary Clinton my head started spinning.
We are seriously talking about the security implication of Anthony Weiner due to his sexual peccadilloes when we are talking about letting Bill freaking Clinton back into the White House?
I know the MSM is still trying to pretend that this is no big deal but I have two words to say to such people:
Jeffrey Epstein

Along with some video from MSNBC at the time with this key exchange

Video that MSNBC suppressed once the Free Beacon linked to it

Maybe it’s just me but given how often we see stuff at mediaite et al it seems rather unusual for a news network to make a copyright claim over a clip from a news story that used as “fair use” by another news organization. Could this suggest that NBC wants to keep this clip out of the public view because it might hurt Hillary?


I can see the NBC reaction now: Nonsense, we’re not censoring the clip at all. The seven minute clip IS available IF you

  1. Go to the Morning Joe site
  2. Hit search taking you to the MSNBC search engine
  3. Search for Donald Trump
  4. Narrow the field to Morning Joe
  5. Narrow the field to May 16th 2016 and sit through all the videos till you find the right one.
  6. And skip ahead to the 12 minute mark on that video.

If you do so you CAN find the clip

Incidentally the clip does not work from the MSNBC site anymore as but the Free Beason has since found another Youtube account with it that is no longer suppressed as the election is long over and the Epstein Story is now public knowledge.

Apparently they aren’t so worried about their copyright after all.

So when ABC tells you they didn’t have the story, look at the faces around that Morning Joe table who all knew what was being said and then try to make that case.

I suspect writing about this type of thing when everyone wanted it suppressed might have something to do with me not making it bigger in the business but then again if I was bigger and writing about it perhaps it might have lead to a sudden heart attack.

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