Only In America
Why hasn't the pistol*-purchasing papa been charged? Lock him up!!*It's "carry-size". How cute.
Tuesday, November 30, 2021
Family Values: Dad Bought The Gun
*It's "carry-size". How cute.
Mournful Piano Music On The News
Who decided on that crap, anyway? And how'd a 15-yr. old w/ problems (but no driver's license) get a gun?
The Sheriff Of Los Angeles County Is A Paranoid Loon
I s'pose if one is gullible enough to believe Bill Gates is putting 5G microchips in vaccines it's not much of a stretch to thinking the Yellow Commie Peril is stealing your precious genetic data when you're being swabbed.Sheriff Alex Villanueva Monday said his deputies and civilian personnel will no longer participate in L.A. County’s COVID-19 registration and testing program, claiming the FBI has warned him that genetic data “will likely be shared with the Republic of China” by the company conducting the testing, Fulgent Genetics Inc.
Monday, November 29, 2021
Sunday, November 28, 2021
Saturday, November 27, 2021
Post-Thanksgiving Thoughts
I'll wager that scrooge John Amato & his crooked lying elves are grateful to get sucker-ass chumps like me to work for them for nothing. Not grateful enough to pay me, of course; that might cut into profit.
Two words: Great Resignation. People are no longer taking shit from their bosses. Stop victimization!!
Used to be seven suckers doing the Blog Round-Up, I think. Does it occur to the fucking ingrates that they might have more than four people typing the damn thing if they paid their typists?
Friday, November 26, 2021
Thursday, November 25, 2021
Canada's Real Loonie
O Canada
Well, I'm Norton VII, Emperor of The United States & Protector of Mexico, & I'm ordering my follower(s) to kill 'em all; Gawd will know his own.Mack Lamoureux / VICE:
QAnon's ‘Queen of Canada’ Calls for Followers to ‘Kill’ People Vaccinating Children — QAnon influencer Romana Didulo told her 70,000 followers that “duck-hunting season is open” and by ducks she means healthcare workers, politicians, and journalists.
Thanks for Nothin', 2021
Another "holiday" on which to wallow in self-pity & potentially murderous rage.
Wednesday, November 24, 2021
Anti-Mask & Anti-Vaccination Ass-Wipes (Literally)
You'll note that beyond the original report from KLAS, CBS & Raw Story, it's the fake news outlets that are very, very excited about this bottle-blonde menace to aviation.
And from behind the L.A. Times paywall:David Charns / KLAS:Allison Elyse Gualtieri / CBS News: Unruly passenger incidents garner federal attention as holiday travel season startsBob Brigham / Raw Story: Woman screams obscenities and 'Let's Go Brandon' as she's kicked off airplane — then gets arrestedDylan Gwinn / Breitbart: Report: Airline Passenger Yells, 'Let's Go Brandon' After Arrest for Refusing to Wear MaskTaylor Giles / The Daily Caller: Police Arrest Woman After She Refused To Wear Mask On Airplane, Yelled 'Let's Go Brandon'Stephen Sorace / Fox News: Las Vegas woman shouting 'let's go Brandon' removed from Allegiant Air flight after causing disturbanceLuke Gentile / Washington Examiner: Woman arrested at airport after allegedly refusing to wear mask and yelling, 'Let's go Brandon'
I hate this fucking country & every shithead in it. Eat your own shit & die, Yankee scum!The Los Angeles Fire Department is investigating an incident in which a firefighter “responded inappropriately” after being handed a letter to comply with the city’s vaccine mandate, a department spokeswoman said Wednesday.The Stentorians of Los Angeles City, a group representing African American firefighters, said Wednesday that the LAFD member responded to receiving the non-compliance letter by dropping his pants and wiping his buttocks with the letter, leaving fecal matter on the document. He then dropped the letter on the ground.
The alleged incident underscores the deep resistance among some within the Fire Department over the city’s mandate that employees be vaccinated.
LAFD spokeswoman Cheryl Getuiza said the alleged incident occurred on Nov. 18. “The department is aware of the seriousness of the allegations and took immediate action upon learning of this incident,” she said Wednesday, but declined to comment on the details.
Fool The FluChump The Coronavirus!
No Tongue This Thanksgiving!
This public health reminder courtesy of the Internet Archive.
Tuesday, November 23, 2021
How. Dare. She?
The numbskulls at the Free Bacon are really grasping at straws.
"Spending spree" my ass. The Vice President of These Untied Snakes is paid US$235,700/yr. I doubt a $375 serving dish will bankrupt the V.P. Whereas Donald Trump spent his money buying the silence of an adult film actress after a spree of his own.EXCLUSIVE: Kamala Harris Bought $375 Pot on Paris Trip
Spending spree at French boutique comes as US families fret over cost of Thanksgiving dinner
Monday, November 22, 2021
Sunday, November 21, 2021
Xmas Xaos Shopping Begins
Dem Ah Loot, Dem Ah Shoot, Dem Ah Wail!
🎶It's Christmas time in the suburbs ...🎵Gang of EIGHTY crowbar-wielding looters in ski masks ransack California Nordstrom and fill 25 cars with designer goods in raid lasting less than one minute — Approximately 80 thieves wearing ski masks stormed the Nordstrom store in Walnut Creek, California around 9pm Saturday nightGabriel Greschler / Mercury News: Three arrested after Saturday night looting at Walnut Creek NordstromEmma Colton / Fox News:California Nordstrom ransacked by 80 looters in ski masks with crowbars and weapons: Witness — One witness described the scene outside of the California Nordstrom as, ‘like a scene out of a movie’ — Fox News Flash top headlines for November 20 — About 80 looters in ski masks ransacked …Joel B. Pollak / Breitbart: WATCH: ‘Mass Looting’ Moves to San Francisco Bay Suburbs; ‘It Was Insane’Jack Davis / The Western Journal: Massive Armed Mob in 25-Car Caravan Rolls Up to California Nordstrom Store, Ransacks the Entire BuildingJohn Hinderaker / Power Line: Looting Comes to the Suburbs
Saturday, November 20, 2021
What Is America, Anyway?
Well, there you have it. If the vigilante killer doesn't get away w/ murder, it just goes to show how "the Left" has ruined this decent, not at all racist country. Whose values are "sordid" now, degenerate whose America is an 18-yr. old killer thug?Kyle Rittenhouse Is America
This is the upside-down world we live in now. If so many of us are so concerned about Kyle Rittenhouse’s verdict, it’s because he embodies so much about the America we love—the America of goodness and decency that the Left has been bushwhacking for decades (and decrying as racist) and that Donald Trump sought to restore. If they succeed in destroying this young man’s life, it will be cruel testimony to the degree to which their lies, their cynicism, and their sordid values have won the day in this country that some of us, at least, still love.
Friday, November 19, 2021
Time To Riot!
You're too bad
Walking up & down w/ a 16 over your back
You must be mad
You're too bad
Too bad fi my purpose
Anybody pop up
And you uh shoot first
You read it here first: These United Snakes are about to be like Jamaica in the 1970s.Seaga used gang violence as a political weapon in 1976 and 1980 when I was making campaign films for the People's National Party under Prime Minister Michael Manley. I witnessed Seaga's thugs use arson and gun terror as tactics to scare and alienate voters from Manley. Seaga at this time in 1976 and 1980 also enjoyed backing from the CIA. Manley strove, in vain, to forge a path of genuine independence, which brought a hostile response from Washington. Manley announced his neutrality in the Cold War, pushed the non-aligned nations groups and pursued friendship to neighboring Cuba. Manley took the lead among the Commonwealth nations in attacking the apartheid government in South Africa and he backed Castro's dispatch of troops to Angola to save its fragile independence from attacking armies from South Africa and Zaire - policies that annoyed Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
It's (Attempted) Murder!
"... only days after six teenagers from a nearby campus were shot and injured at a park."Nine wounded but not one fatality? You stupid punks won't get anywhere w/o practice; when did the N.R.A. stop training America's wanna-be young murderers?
It's Murder!
- Kill the judge.
- Kill the jury.
- Kill the murderer.
The laws against illegal gun possession & crossing state lines w/ an illegally obtained weapon mean nothing. Nor does the L.A. Sheriff's shooting policy. Why should I obey any of your laws? Let anarchy reign!A Los Angeles jury Friday acquitted L.A. Sheriff’s Deputy Luke Liu of voluntary manslaughter in the killing of an unarmed motorist at a Norwalk gas station in 2016.Baker pointed out that Sheriff’s Department policy prohibits deputies from shooting at moving cars. Under the policy, "firearms shall not be discharged at a stationary or moving vehicle" or its occupants unless deputies are being threatened with a gun or some other "deadly force by means other than the moving vehicle."
“Francisco Garcia should not have stolen the car. He should not have tried to flee,” Baker told the jury. “But he didn’t deserve to die for it.”
Friday (200 Motels) Freak Out
A real throbber, w/ a honking sax.
Thursday, November 18, 2021
Wednesday, November 17, 2021
Tweet Of The Day
You tell 'em, Maddie!! https://t.co/HyLIfhl46P
— M. Bouffant (@MBouffant) November 18, 2021
New Standard Republican Disclaimer: "Don't Do Any Death Threats."
"We're Not The Party Of Violence Like The Democrats"
But there'll be a "price of blood".Big-Talking Pin-Dicked Presidents
Limp-dicked losers still trying to show Mommy something, from The Nix to Lumpy.Website. Spotted here,
if you can get past the paywall.Column: Paul Gosar’s anime video of killing AOC is not a joke. It displays the new GOP’s violent extremist turn.
Tuesday, November 16, 2021
The System Is A Fraud
Nuthin', y'hear, nuthin'!How Judges Turn Your Legal Rights Into Worthless Promises
If courts make it impossible for you to do anything about violations of your rights, those rights are worth nothing at all.
The NYT: Just How Stupid Are They?
The mind boggles.
Most people learn after one, maybe two mistakes.Sophie Egan / New York Times:
Does It Matter if I Eat the Stickers on Fruits and Vegetables? — I keep finding myself biting into an apple or a peach, only to find I've eaten half the sticker the store put on there. Is there any harm in eating produce stickers? — While the stickers that get placed on fruits
Can't read the whole thing, this may be more of an indictment of the sort of knobs who read The NYT than an actual NYT reporter. But one never knows.
Fuck Chris Christie In His Fat Slob Mouth
What an insufferable piece of fat lying crap. Disgusting to see, repugnant to hear. Shove his bulllshit book up his lard ass & leave it there.
Monday, November 15, 2021
Lunatic Parents Against Children's Mental Health
Apparently it's a commie plot, like everything else.
“Some of these kids, they’re just trying to get through the day, get through compacted math, get through algebra, go to cotillion on Sunday,” Eddins said. “They are not thinking about these issues.”
And of course:Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read. Forget I mentioned it. This song has no message. Rise for the flag salute.— F. Zappa, liner notes to "Hungry Freaks, Daddy", on Freak Out, 1966
First they came for the election officials, then they came for the school boards & the teachers ... will your lame asses be next?Some parent groups have made more radical claims about social emotional learning, echoing baseless conspiracy theories popular among followers of QAnon.At an event at a church in Whiteland, Indiana, last month hosted by the activist group Purple for Parents Indiana, Rhonda Miller, the group’s president, said grade school lessons centered on emotions are meant to prepare children for sex trafficking by teaching them to be accepting of LGBTQ identities and introducing them to books about sex, gender and sexuality.
“The schools are too dangerous,” Miller told the audience, according to a video of the meeting posted online. “They are doing exactly what they were designed to do. They’re not broken. When you go back and you look at the history of public education, it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do, which was to take our system down from within.”
Sunday, November 14, 2021
"... Wrapped In The Flag & Carrying The Cross"
Michael Flynn tonight: “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God.” pic.twitter.com/ShGVrsQ9hW
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) November 13, 2021
Meanwhile, a WSJ editorial page shitheel knows what the real problem is. Not Republicans threatening violence & attempting to strangle democracy in the statehouses, or calling for a national religion, but commies, who've apparently taken over. (How'd I miss that?) By the way, fascism/"national conservatism" has been tried many times, & most of us know (& admit) how that ended.Former Trump National Security Advisor (for about 14 seconds) Michael Flynn tonight: “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God.”So for all of you who had “America is an autocratic theocracy” on your "American Democratic Bingo” cards, go ahead and fill it in now.
Hmmm. Guess "National Socialism" was already taken. You'll note this clown's first political insight concerned a mattress tag. He gets "national decay" in too. Not the decay on the right that led to the unmentioned-by-this-sucker events of 6 January 2021 at the U.S. Capitol, speaking of the arrival of radicalism, but this crap:Why America Needs National Conservatism
Today’s central challenge is an aggressive, ascendant radical left. Incremental reform won’t counter it.
Proponents of communism often say it’s never really been tried. Progressivism can no longer make that excuse. Its doctrines are being widely implemented by earnest practitioners with wide establishment support. The results have come in with astonishing speed. Mayhem and misery at an open national border. Riot and murder in lawless city neighborhoods. Political indoctrination of schoolchildren. Government by executive ukase. Shortages throughout the world’s richest economy. Suppression of religion and private association. Regulation of everyday language—complete with contrived redefinitions of familiar words and ritual recantations for offenders.This makes an easy case for national conservatism. Natcons are conservatives who have been mugged by reality. We have come away with a sense of how to recover from the horrors taking America down.
When the American left was liberal and reformist, conservatives played our customary role as moderators of change. We too breathed the air of liberalism, and there are always things that could stand a little reforming. We could be Burkeans—with an emphasis on incremental improvement, continuity with the past, avoiding unintended consequences, and working within a budget. In the 1970s I collaborated with liberals on regulatory reform—refining environmental policies and restraining crony capitalism. Such bipartisan pragmatism yielded many improvements.
But today’s woke progressivism isn’t reformist. It seeks not to build on the past but to promote instability, to turn the world upside-down. In 1968, Democratic mayors sided with police and prosecutors against rioters and lawbreakers. In 2020, they took the side of lawbreakers. Last year, congressional progressives not only rejected Sen. Tim Scott’s police reforms but vilified and degraded him. This year they vilify any Democrat whose spending plan is less than revolutionary. Compromise is antithetical to their goals and methods.
When the leftward party in a two-party system is seized by such radicalism, the conservative instinct for moderation is futile and may be counterproductive. Yet many conservative politicians stick with it, promising to correct specific excesses that have stirred popular revulsion. Republicans will win some elections that way—but what will they do next? National conservatives recognize that in today’s politics, the excesses are the essence. Like Burke after 1789, we shift to opposing revolution tout court.
Why national conservatism? Have you noticed that almost every progressive initiative subverts the American nation? Explicitly so in opening national borders, disabling immigration controls, and transferring sovereignty to international bureaucracies. But it also works from within—elevating group identity above citizenship; fomenting racial, ethnic and religious divisions; disparaging common culture and the common man; throwing away energy independence; defaming our national history as a story of unmitigated injustice; hobbling our national future with gargantuan debts that will constrain our capacity for action.
The left’s anti-nationalism is another sharp break with the past. Democratic presidents of previous eras—including the original progressive, Woodrow Wilson —were ardent nationalists. But in 2021 President Biden gazed on his countrymen’s epic invention of Covid vaccines and concluded that he should help the World Health Organization seize their patents.
The explanation for the break is that modern progressives imagine themselves as champions of humanity at large and the nation as a primitive artifact that constrains human aspiration and inhibits global solutions. Progressives see the downtrodden as held down by structures of systemic privilege, embedded in the nation’s traditions and institutions.
National conservatives understand that these are romantic delusions. Nations evolved organically over centuries of struggle, trial and error and acquired staying power. Man is naturally social and fraternal, and successful nations have learned how to transmute group loyalties into broader allegiance. Citizens understand that their security and freedoms depend on their nation and its imperfect institutions—that their fortunes are linked for better or worse to those of their disparate compatriots.
These circumstances give national conservatives a lot to work with. To be sure, three of the foundations of nationhood—family, religion and locality—are far weaker than in earlier times. Yet Americans remain notably patriotic. They realize that our liberties, our prosperity and our institutions of justice are rare achievements. The sense of national decline is prevalent among many American voters. If they can be persuaded that progressivism is not energetic idealism but a program for national dissolution, we may make headway.
My strategy is to show that each controversy is part of a larger movement that threatens our national ideals, institutions and stability. Consider the efforts to establish critical race theory and sexual optionality in primary and secondary schools. A great many Americans, including the prized electorate of suburban women, pay only passing attention to these weird developments when they involve adults who can fend for themselves, but rush to the barricades when they are imposed on innocent neighborhood children.
It’s a perfect case for targeted, single-issue correction—but also for illustrating the sources of national decay. The school controversies dramatize the shrinking domain of family, parenthood and religion; the pathologies of educational monopolies and teachers unions; and the cultural elites’ practice of wrapping themselves in moral virtue at the expense of the minorities they claim to be championing.
The move from criticism to nation rebuilding makes national conservatism a political movement, not simply a school of thought. We are concerned not only with the errors of our intellectual adversaries but with the circumstances of our fellow citizens. That has led us to the problems of our working-class compatriots in declining regions whose interests had been ignored in national politics and policy. We need to turn in the same spirit to the problems of our African-American compatriots in poor, violent, fatherless urban precincts. If the elites would scuttle the nation, the rest of us will have to come together to rescue it.
Many affluent, highly educated Americans who are not hard progressives are imbued with the universal humanitarianism I have mentioned. Well, we have a large and universal canvas of humanity here at home. But that humanity is our countrymen, with rights and responsibilities equal to our own. They have our empathy and support—and also our firm expectations as fellow citizens and teammates. Nationalism, properly understood, is the most potent kind of humanitarianism.
Being part of a movement can be good for us, too, as a corrective to the tendency of intellectuals to overtheorize. National conservatives hold a variety of views about our predecessors in 20th-century conservatism, neoconservatism, libertarianism and constitutional originalism. In the extreme, it is said that those isms accomplished nothing and only set the scene for our current shambles. This exaggerates the potential of ideas to affect the course of society.
I was engaged in each of those movements. We made some mistakes and compromises that might have turned out better. But we were alert to the opportunities and constraints at hand, and we got a few things right. The great prosperity of the 1980s and the luminous revival of New York City in the 1990s were the products of conservative ideas applied strategically against ferocious opposition. Originalism rescued our written Constitution from untethered judicial extemporizing and turned attention to the Founders’ principles. But we never thought our ideas were perfect, and we realized that our successes would be partial and contingent and would expose further difficulties for our successors to grapple with.
We were also aware of deep cultural changes that could overwhelm everything we were doing. Decades ago, the neocons Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Irving Kristol and James Q. Wilson published prophetic studies of the decline of marriage, family and religion, and warned that it could produce social upheavals that politics and policy would be helpless to ameliorate. Recently, a young natcon explained to me that capitalism must operate within a moral framework. “That is extremely interesting,” I said. “Have you ever heard of Michael Novak ?” “No,” he replied, “who is he? Does he do a podcast?”
It is certainly true that those forms of conservatism didn’t keep up with the times. What began as strategies designed for immediate circumstances tended to harden into overarching philosophies, glib talking points, Beltway careers. One wishes conservatism had adapted itself to new problems before they became as dire as they are. But many terrible developments—such as the pathologies of social media and the arrival of Marxian radicalism in a political system we had thought immune—were understood by practically no one until they were upon us.
So here we are. Our defining challenges are to revive our cultural and political institutions, reintroduce a morally informed common culture, recast America’s role in world security, and revise the social compact of business and government. A tall order! Let me offer a few observations from the standpoint of a free-market man.
I have been a libertarian since I was a little boy and noticed the label on my mattress: “Do Not Remove Under Penalty of Law.” But then, as a young man, I attended my first capital-L Libertarian conference, where people were wearing buttons that said “Freedom Is My God” and “There Is No Such Thing as Society.” These were as frightening as the mattress label, and I sought a middle ground that balanced freedom with virtue, markets with society, and recognized that you can’t have one without the other.
I settled on empirical libertarianism, which considers each policy on the merits but in the spirit of Adam Smith: Government interventions “ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention.” I also understood that freedom, although grounded in human nature and God’s design, is in practice an artifact of government. Property and contract, freedom of speech and religion and commercial competition, separation of powers, due process of law—all were introduced and calibrated through centuries of piecemeal conflict and resolution. Government is at once the source of our freedoms and their most dangerous enemy.
We face the need to rebalance freedom and virtue, market and society. Private enterprise is the source of cornucopian blessings, but it needs boundaries and discipline. It has become a willing accomplice of cultural decline and has developed global markets that eclipse the nation and divide its citizens. These developments are largely the result of modern technology, not any political doctrine, but they demand political responses.
Here national conservatives face a dilemma that is well known to empirical libertarians: How can government reform the society it is designed to represent and protect? Government and markets are both mechanisms for interpreting prevailing interests and preferences. But government is more responsive to large, well-connected groups and tends to entrench them—its responses are less open to challenge and adaptation than the market’s. This problem is exacerbated by today’s “executive state,” a particularly uncongenial setting for national conservatives. It consists of a profusion of special-purpose bureaucracies with little ability to discern, articulate or pursue the common good.
One approach is to start with the tried and true. Facebook and other powerful network czars are going to be regulated in some fashion, and the common-carrier obligation has a long pedigree in Anglo-American law. Americans have excelled at big, bureaucracy-busting projects in science and engineering, most recently Operation Warp Speed. Cybersecurity and quantum computing are prime candidates for such national mobilization, and this could do much to redomesticate production in critical fields. Self-help is another American specialty. Our once-great universities and museums were established by private initiative. We are a rich nation and could do that again.
Another strategy is to direct our reformist energies at our decrepit political institutions themselves, aiming to make them more attentive to the state of the union rather than to yesterday’s polls and tweets. This is my own field, where I think much can be accomplished within our constitutional structure and traditions. The originalist in me notes that the president is not only CEO of the executive bureaucracies but also, and primarily, head of state, responsible for the nation’s success and all of its citizens’ welfare.
National conservatism, not Marxian progressivism, is today’s vanguard. My own motto for national conservatism is another extrapolation from Adam Smith: There is a great deal of ruin in a nation, especially these days—but also a great deal of repair, especially in America.
Mr. DeMuth is a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute. This article is adapted from a Nov. 1 speech at the National Conservatism Conference, which he chaired.
No one but the right-wing radicals using social media to promote radicalism & attempt to overthrow the duly-elected gov't. even noticed! Get out from under your rock, ninny.But many terrible developments—such as the pathologies of social media and the arrival of Marxian radicalism in a political system we had thought immune—were understood by practically no one until they were upon us.
The poor (& apparently colorless) hicks have just been ignored by the elites, you see, while, well, you know how "our African-American compatriots" are."... the problems of our working-class compatriots in declining regions whose interests had been ignored in national politics and policy. We need to turn in the same spirit to the problems of our African-American compatriots in poor, violent, fatherless urban precincts."
It's all 180° off projection from upside-down & backwards world; every accusation is a confession. For whatever reason it wasn't paywalled when morbid curiosity made me click. Enjoy!
Saturday, November 13, 2021
Rooting For The Plague, A Meteor, Or Anything ...
... that'll save me having to kill each of you eight billion bastard morons individually. If the Guardian's right, the plague may be back, & as always these United Snakes won't do a damn thing. Unless you think this nation of sheep will remove head from ass & do this:
This reporter is not holding his breath. See you losers in the boneyard.Otherwise, we will probably face a fifth wave. Now is not the time for happy talk, but to instead show we can persevere, run this marathon, make it to the finish line. We can acknowledge and accept endemicity – that a low level of Covid will remain in the background, but that is not >75,000 new cases a day. Instead of succumbing to yet another major rise in cases and their sequelae, this is a chance for America to finally rise to the occasion, showing an ability to lead and execute.
Standard Time Saturday
Friday the 13th arrives a day late.
The copyright is history; here's a link to the source.
Friday, November 12, 2021
No Comment
Andrew Court / New York Post:
‘Super flexible’ Joe Rogan says he can perform fellatio on himself — He's no ordinary Joe Blow! — Joe Rogan says he's so flexible he is capable of performing oral sex on himself. — The controversial podcaster, 54, made the crude claim during a new episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience
Thursday, November 11, 2021
Crime Out-Of-Control In California? You're Being Lied To Again.
And of course the fucking New York Times swallows it whole, as Popular Information has determined. Read it all, I couldn't be arsed to excerpt it effectively.
Course, shoplifting today isn't what it was in the '70s. Used to be a spot w/o cameras near the bakery in "Rock'n'Roll" Ralphs on Sunset where one could slip anything reasonably-sized (a chunk of rat cheese was a favorite) from cart to clothing. Ah, memories ...
Explains why the right-wing fake news was all over it. 'Though I must admit I was all in favor of it. Matter of grim fact, I may take up shoplifting again if prices don't come down. Thinking the 5.9% Social Security COLA will barely be noticed.The New York Times piece did not appear in a vacuum. The false narrative of out-of-control crime in San Francisco, and California as a whole, is being pushed relentlessly by a far-right website run by a former Republican consultant who received a pardon from Trump.California's leading source of crime disinformation
On October 21, the California Globe published a story about a Target store in downtown San Francisco that was closing “amid shoplifting tidal wave.” The story was an exclusive and featured several unnamed San Francisco Police Department officers who claimed that the Mission Street Target will “be closed by the end of the year despite having solid revenue, because they cannot get the shoplifting under control.”
Ahmaud Arbery Murder Trial: "Black Pastors" Too Much For White Lawyer
Couldn't find any Christian Identity pastors to show up for your side, hate-filled cracker?
Service Is For Suckers
If you were too stupid, lazy or chicken to dodge the draft, you're a loser chump. If you volunteered you're a wanna-be Nazi baby-killer. Case closed.
Wednesday, November 10, 2021
Lock Her Up Too!!
Great question! Anyone? pic.twitter.com/emzjWKtdRX
— 🖕🏻Aunt Crabby Calls Bullshit 🖕🏻 (@DearAuntCrabby) November 10, 2021
Weaseldick Weds.
Per Juanita Jean, Matthew McConaughey is mucking up the Texas goobernatorial race by playing coy. Isn't pimping Lincolns enough for his Hollywood ego? Let people who are qualified do it, Reagan wanna-be.
Tuesday, November 9, 2021
"Bitter Clingers" & "Deplorables"
Now "Hillbillies & Fruitcakes"
Elitist grifters condescend to their cracker marks.
Hope America's hillbillies & fruitcakes enjoyed paying for Wayne LaPierre's expensive Eye-talian suits.Tim Mak / NPR:
A secret tape made after Columbine shows the NRA's evolution on school shootings — Soon after the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, senior leaders of the National Rifle Association huddled on a conference call to consider canceling their annual convention, scheduled just days later and a few miles away.Alex Griffing / Mediaite: NRA Called Members ‘Hillbillies’ and ‘Fruitcakes’ in Panicked Talks After Columbine Massacre, New Tapes RevealMatthew Chapman / Raw Story: NRA leaders privately feared pro-gun ‘hillbillies’ and ‘fruitcakes’ would cause backlash after Columbine in newly released tapes
Molotov Cocktail Time!
Who's the victim here? A reminder:Lauren Kaori Gurley / VICE:
"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.""The fascist state is the corporate state."-Il Duce
A Republican Wife-Beater Speaks
Jesus Gawd.
Who’s gonna tell him?
— David Priess (@DavidPriess) November 9, 2021
“It used to be, you know, women were attracted to your strength because you could defend them from dinosaurs.”pic.twitter.com/fxiCJLeNWL
Monday, November 8, 2021
Argon Alert
Sky2 at 1711PT, five mins. before it went live:
Left to this reporter to be on the ground for ... the rest of the story.Arty shot:Although argon is non-toxic, it is 38% more dense than air and therefore considered a dangerous asphyxiant in closed areas. It is difficult to detect because it is colorless, odorless, and tasteless.
Sunday, November 7, 2021
Spooky Sunday Service
An exorcism. Note ghosts leaving.
So much for the Jesus of the Mid-Western Protestants who infested Los Angeles & slapped up churches during the Roaring Twenties.
Hey! Shouldn't right now be Roaring Twenties II, "post"-pandemic & all?
War On Culture, Education Continues
We hope J.D. Vance is happy.
A mere matter of time until this sort of thing is no longer a threat but a promise.Columbia Campus Cleared After Bomb Threats At Ivy Schools — Columbia University said its buildings have been cleared for re-entry after bomb threats on Sunday were deemed “not credible” by the New York City Police Department. — Two other Ivy League universities — Cornell University …
"That Is Not A Cat"
The fox returned, and was escorted up the tunnel pic.twitter.com/YYbuySPiK5
— Internet #BlackLivesMatter (@cjzero) November 7, 2021
Saturday, November 6, 2021
J.D. Vance, The Education Candidate
In its entirety, because of the paywall.
On Tuesday, J.D. Vance, author of the bestselling “Hillbilly Elegy” and now candidate for the U.S. Senate from Ohio, gave a keynote speech at the National Conservatism Conference titled “The Universities Are the Enemy.”In the speech, he told his audience: “I think in this movement of national conservatism, what we need more than inspiration is wisdom. And there is a wisdom in what Richard Nixon said approximately 40, 50 years ago. He said, and I quote: ‘The professors are the enemy.’”
Nixon actually said these words to his then-national security advisor, the Harvard professor Henry Kissinger. He added, in a professorial flourish, “write that on a blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”
This hatred of professors and their universities seems to be a big deal for Vance. On his campaign website, under the heading “Protect Conservative Values,” he complains that “hundreds of billions of American tax dollars” get sent to universities that “teach that America is an evil, racist nation.” These universities “then train teachers who bring that indoctrination into our elementary and high schools.” He doesn’t want any tax dollars going to institutions that teach “critical race theory or radical gender ideology.” Instead, he wants them to deliver “an honest, patriotic account of American history.” Other sections of the website extol the glories of the 2nd Amendment, while ranting about immigrants and COVID-19 regulations.
Vance’s complaint is at least as old as the trial of Socrates in the Athens of 399 BCE. Socrates was sentenced to death for teachings that supposedly corrupted the youth of Athens and mocked the city’s gods. Vilifying professors has been the theme of a certain kind of politics ever since.
Ironically, the same Henry Kissinger who heard Nixon’s 1972 rant about professors made his own academic reputation writing about Prince Klemens von Metternich, the top minister of the Austrian Empire from 1809 to 1848. Metternich was a conservative strongman, perhaps the Vladimir Putin of his day. He didn’t like professors either.
In 1820, Metternich wrote that the main evil of his time was “presumption,” his word for the habit of educated people to question authority. “Experience has no value for the presumptuous man; faith is nothing to him,” he said. Ordinary working people, he said, did not fall prey to these illusions because they were too busy with the hard labor of their own lives. Not so the professors who were his target: the “real cosmopolitans ... men of letters, lawyers, and the individuals charged with public education.”
Just like Vance, Metternich thought the only counterweight to such errors was to be found in “wisdom” — which meant accepting Metternich’s authority and all conservative values with it.
The fascist movements of the 20th century were notoriously anti-intellectual and anti-professor. In a relatively unscripted moment in a 1938 speech, Adolf Hitler said he regretted that his regime still had some need for its “intellectual classes,” otherwise, “one day we could, I don’t know, exterminate them or something.”
Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, was irritated by academics’ tendency to examine political statements for their truth value. But he concluded that “I do not believe that university professors make history.”
Why is it that professors have always drawn the anger of authoritarians? Authoritarians themselves will always claim that academic activity is subversive, unpatriotic and immoral — and thus a serious threat to society. But let’s be real for a moment. Goebbels actually had a point.
The great majority of scholarly publications are read by only a tiny handful of professional colleagues. Academics who somehow reach a broader public audience are usually highly untypical of their profession. As for our nefarious activity in the classroom: I can assure Vance that I could never indoctrinate any student into anything, even if I wanted to. I keep a file of amusing exam answers. To put it gently, students don’t always listen. Any indoctrination I tried would surely backfire.
If Vance were to be honest about who he thinks his enemies really are, he would have to say minorities, immigrants and others who don’t fit into his vision of American values. These are the people hurt by the kind of politics he advances. But it doesn’t sound quite so good to say this out loud.
Professors, on the other hand, are a perfect target, and perfect scapegoats. The work they do is often obscure and mysterious for people outside the academy. They are easy to caricature as out of touch, or worse. Most importantly, they do not have the power or media reach to fight back.
Vance is right about one thing, though. So long as he pursues a politics of division, fear, hatred and mass death from COVID and guns, I will oppose him. I will probably be an ineffective enemy. But I will do my best.
Benjamin Carter Hett is a professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, and the author of “The Death of Democracy” and “The Nazi Menace.”
Friday, November 5, 2021
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