Tag: media

They all knew

A woman’s expose of Brian Epstein in Vanity Fair was whitewashed back in 2003:

I got to work on all of it—and Epstein kept close tabs on me. He didn’t want to be seen to cooperate, but he’d do his best to control me. He phoned regularly. I wasn’t altogether surprised to be quickly summoned to the offices of the rich and powerful, sometimes before I’d even asked to meet with them.

James “Jimmy” Cayne, then the cigar-chomping CEO of Bear Stearns, not only phoned me up, he found the time in his busy day to give me a tour of the office. He was on his best behavior, talking up Epstein’s alleged supposed great brain, his value to the bank—never mind the fact that Epstein had had to leave it quickly in 1981; this Cayne put down to Epstein’s ambition “outgrowing” the place.

I also met with respected real estate developer Marshall Rose; the former Bear Stearns chairman Alan “Ace” Greenberg called me; so too did Leslie Wexner, the founder and CEO of The Limited, who trusted Epstein so much he had given Epstein carte blanche to insert himself into both Wexner’s family and business affairs, according to people who saw Epstein’s contract; they all chattered on about Epstein’s brilliantly creative mind, his intellectual prowess—a mental agility that, to put it bluntly, was simply not evident in the many phone conversations he had with me….

I worked through December 2002 like a dog. I worked with three fact-checkers, the magazine’s lawyer; I sifted through everything Epstein threw at me and defused it. We were getting ready to go to press. And then the bullet came. “Graydon’s taking out the women from the piece,” Doug Stumpf, my editor, told me.

I began to cry. It was so wrong. The family had been so brave. I thought about the mother, her fear of the dark, of the harm she feared might come to her daughters. And then I thought of all the rich, powerful men in suits ready to talk about Epstein’s “great mind.”

“Why?” I asked Graydon. “He’s sensitive about the young women” was his answer. “And we still get to run most of the piece.”

And then the guy got his wrist slapped four years later for multiple sex offenses that should have been enough to put him away for a long time.

The thing is, if a man has a brilliantly creative mind, an intelligent woman is not merely going to notice it, she’s going to be drawn to it. So, whatever it was that those very rich men saw in Epstein, I very much doubt that it was his intellect that made him so valuable to them.

Jack and the bullshit artist

Despite having been threatened by an unlikely beating at the hands of his corpse and being more than a little dubious about his war stories, I find that I rather like the aspects of Jack Kirby that are revealed by this extensive interview. I particularly liked the way he took on Jimmy Olsen, the worst-performing comic in the DC catalog, rather than the Superman comic that was offered to him, simply because he knew that doing so would be a better way of proving himself.

And frankly, it strikes me as more than a little fitting that Stan Lee will exit this Earth under a cloud of disgrace, given the fact that he appears to have pulled off one of the great con jobs of the 20th century:

GROTH: At the risk of sounding partisan, let me ask you this: every time I read something by Stan or see Stan speak publicly, I’m struck by how obvious a bullshit artist he is. Was he always that way?

ROZ KIRBY: Yeah.

KIRBY: Yes. Yes, I knew Stan when he was a young boy.

ROZ KIRBY: He was Mr. Personality. That’s what he was.

KIRBY: If you ever get to talk with Joe Simon, Simon will tell you exactly what the hell Stan Lee was. He was just a little wise guy, and he came from a family that was upper-middle class, and he could do whatever he liked. He could say whatever he liked. I’ll be frank with you. We considered him a pain in the ass. He grew up to be exactly what we considered him.

Let’s face it, America can’t say that Jack Kirby didn’t warn them.

“Stan Lee was a pest.” You don’t say.

Blowing the lid off

An article entitled New Book Blows the Lid Off the Dark World of Child Sex Abuse in Sci-Fi Fandom is now trending on PJ Media.

Moira Greyland is the daughter of famous authors Marion Bradley Zimmer and Walter Breen. She has written a memoir about growing up in a “queer” family and suffering hideous child abuse. In The Last Closet: The Dark Side of Avalon, Greyland details the horror of being a helpless child trapped in a far left fantasy world. The world constructed by her mother, author of The Mists of Avalon, and her father, author of Greek Love (a book literally detailing why pedophilia is fine and even good) was a dark and frightening world. Unfortunately, though many saw how unhappy Greyland and her siblings were, no one stepped in to stop it and, in fact, turned a blind eye.

Greyland’s description of her family’s philosophy is chilling. “All sex is always right no matter what.” This philosophy forced her to endure being raped by her father at the achingly innocent age of four and molested by her mother throughout her childhood. Both her parents insisted she was gay because they believed that every person is naturally homosexual and will be homosexual if not corrupted by heterosexual experiences. Through the exposure to two gay parents and relatives and their friends, Greyland developed a theory about homosexuality that is very unpopular.

“It is my belief that homosexuality is a matter of IMPRINTING, in the same way that BDSM fantasies are,” she explains in the book. “To the BDSM’er, continued practice of the fantasy is sexually exciting. To the gay person, naturally, the same. However, from what I have seen, neither one creates healing. My mother became a lesbian because she was raped by her father. My father was molested by a priest–and regarded it as being the only love he had ever experienced. There are a vanishingly few people who are exclusively gay, but far more who have relationships with people of BOTH genders, as my parents and other relatives did.”

This, of course, is not allowed to be discussed in the age of the Gaystappo, which must be praised at all times. But do we not owe it to the children raised in these environments to hear their experiences? Does the #MeToo craze include the children of gays who did not have idyllic experiences?

Read the whole thing. It’s a remarkably in-depth article about Moira Greyland’s The Last Closet.

Bannon out at Breitbart

Steve Bannon has resigned from Breitbart News:

Stephen K. Bannon stepped down on Tuesday from his post as executive chairman of Breitbart News, ostracized for now from conservative circles and the Republican Party he brazenly predicted he would remake.

Mr. Bannon’s departure, which was initiated by an estranged financial patron and Breitbart investor, Rebekah Mercer, came as Mr. Bannon remained unable to quell the furor over remarks attributed to him in a new book in which he questions President Trump’s mental fitness and disparages his son Donald Trump Jr.

Mr. Bannon and Breitbart will work together on a smooth transition, said a statement from the company’s chief executive, Larry Solov. Separately, SiriusXM, which broadcasts a radio show on which Mr. Bannon was a host, said it was also cutting ties with him.

If this is all a charade, Team Trump are going to unprecedented lengths to make it look legitimate. But I’m more than a little dubious about all the sudden charges that both Bannon and Trump are mentally unstable and so forth. The vultures really have it in for him.

Defense doesn’t win

Not when it comes to the media. The God-Emperor needs to remember this and go back on the attack:

President Trump defended his mental health again at a press conference on Saturday, saying his Ivy League education, television fame and 2016 election win are proof he is more than competent to run the country.

Responding to claims in Michael Wolff’s new book Fire and Fury that White House insiders worry he is suffering mental decline, the president fired back and said he was never interviewed for it – hours after declaring himself a ‘very stable genius’ on Twitter.

‘It’s a disgrace that he can do something like this,’ said Trump said of Wolff, who he called a ‘fraud’ as he attacked the libel laws in the United States at a Camp David press conference attended by GOP leaders.

‘Libel laws are very weak in this country. If they were stronger, hopefully, you would not have something like that happen,’ said Trump who had defended his intelligence just moments before. 

‘Only because I went to the best colleges, I was an excellent student, came out and made billions and billions of dollars and became one of the top business people, went to television and was a tremendous success, as I am sure you all know and ran for president first time and won.’

‘And then this guy who doesn’t know me, doesn’t know me at all. Who said he interviewed me for three hours in the White House, it didn’t exist, it’s in his imagination.’

‘He was never in the Oval Office,’ said the president who blamed ‘Sloppy’ Steve Bannon for bringing him into the White House.

Trump then dubbed the biography ‘a work of fiction’.

Earlier on Saturday, Wolff, who is a contributor to the Hollywood Reporter, gave that publication a follow up interview on Saturday in which he said he knew Trump was apoplectic with rage over the book.

‘I hear that the president is very angry, or, let me be precise: I hear that he is truly bouncing off the walls,’ said Wolff to the magazine.

The journalist’s book – ‘Fire and Fury’ has already shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller’s list and portrays Trump as an imbecile who never believed he would win the 2016 election. The book also severely questions the president’s ability to carry out his job and casts aspersions on his mental acuity amid suggestions from White House sources he might be losing his mind.

This is a classic gamma attack on an alpha. The gamma doesn’t have any actual power, so he lies about the alpha, thereby angering the alpha, and provoking him into a response that the gamma then smugly claims to be a victory. And you know this guy Wolff is a total gamma by the way he asserts that no one in the Trump White House reads books because they hadn’t heard of him. I read, edit, and write books and I’d never heard of him either. That’s a phenomenal example of gamma posturing combined with self-serving gamma logic.

The problem that Trump has here is that it doesn’t matter how intelligent and mentally stable you actually are, or how accomplished you are, you’re never going to look either smart or mentally stable by stating the obvious. It always comes off as a angry, bewildered, overmatched unfrozen caveman claiming “me am too smart!”

It’s considerably more effective to call out the gamma directly, openly mock him, and engage in direct conflict with him by utilizing objective measures. Trump should have a) compared his SAT scores with the journalist’s own scores while b) having the Secret Service dig up Wolff’s history of mental health issues and calling them into question. The chances are very high that Wolff, who is a known fabricator, has been on some sort of medication for depression for years and is doing little more than projecting his own mental instability onto the God-Emperor.

Gammas always, always, always rely upon nebulous insinuation and provocation, and they always, always, always retreat from any form of conflict that can be objectively measured by outsiders. For example, this is why the site traffic comparison is so damaging to Scalzi; there is simply no amount of dancing, twisting, redefining, or obfuscation that can permit him to credibly claim victory somehow which his gamma nature psychologically requires.

This also demonstrates why a knowledge of socio-sexuality is crucial in understanding how to appropriately respond to attacks. Wolff is absolutely delighted with being angrily denounced in general terms. That, to the gamma, is exactly what victory over an alpha looks like.

We know Trump isn’t a sigma because he didn’t simply smile and publicly ignore the book while having both Wolff and his publisher audited by the IRS and investigated by the DEA.

(((Fake American History)))

Every single time. (((Journalists))) lie every single time. You simply have to assume that literally everything they assert to be fact is false until shown otherwise by more reliable sources.

As journalists write about immigration policy, we need to take care not to slip into these loaded phrases. For decades, “chain migration” was known as “family-based migration system,” which allows members of families to sponsor relatives.
– Jonathan Weisman, Deputy Washington Editor, The New York Times

A simple resort to Google NGram proves that Weisman, to no one’s surprise, is lying. Again. What is worse, he is lying in an attempt to complete the destruction of America, just like the melting pottists, the Communists, the Judeo-Christians, and the immigrationists. There is a reliable pattern here: those who hate America always portray a false version of its history.

He proposes a unification of American Judaism around the defense of self and of others even more vulnerable: the undocumented immigrants, refugees, Muslim Americans, and black activists who have been directly targeted, not just by the tolerated Alt Right, but by the Trump White House itself.

Translation: Uh oh, through absolutely no fault of our own, we seem to have somehow pissed off our hosts again. Whatever else he is, Weisman is an infiltrator and an anti-American. He has to go back.

Meanwhile, Israel is actively deporting all of its African immigrants. As it should.

Illegal African migrants found still living in Israel by April could face indefinite imprisonment if they don’t leave voluntarily. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to expel remaining “illegal infiltrators” from Africa. “We have expelled about 20,000 and now the mission is to get the rest out,” Netanyahu said on Wednesday in public remarks at a cabinet meeting that approved the scheme. Some 60,000 Africans, mostly from Eritrea and Sudan, entered Israel before it erected a fence along its border with Egypt in 2013.

What a pity that neither Americans nor Europeans have a single leader as willing to defend their nations in the way that Netanyahu is defending the Jewish nation.

And this is why you don’t chase money

As I wrote previously, Bannon really is not a strategic thinker. It’s much better to build a broad, self-sustaining support network than depend upon the momentary whims of the ultra-rich:

Former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon has reportedly lost the support of billionaire backer Rebekah Mercer after he suggested he might run for president himself.

A person close to Mercer told The Washington Post that she no longer supports Bannon. According to the report, Mercer was frustrated with Bannon’s strategy in the Alabama Senate special election and pulled her funding after he told other major conservative donors that Mercer would back Bannon in his own presidential bid.

Bannon, now head of Breitbart News, supported Alabama GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore, who was dogged by allegations of sexual misconduct, in his eventual defeat to now-Sen. Doug Jones (D) in December.

“The core constituency for Breitbart is what you would call the Trump Deplorables. That’s the audience. And if they’re asked to choose between Steve and Trump, they’re going to choose Trump. That’s clear,” a person familiar with Breitbart News’s operations told the Post.

It was unclear from the report whether Mercer, who bought a stake of Breitbart News from her father in November, will continue to back the right-wing news site. The report said she is no longer backing any future Bannon projects.

To be honest, this initial support for Milo and Bannon, followed by sudden withdrawals of that support, looks more than a little strategic itself.  And seriously, the partnership was always destined to fail if a loose cannon like Bannon can cut his own supply lines with nothing more than some obviously unserious musings about his own political prospects.

Will Bannon recover?

Katie McHugh thinks so, and has some interesting insights into Bannon’s character when she’s not talking about herself:

Will Bannon recover from this nuclear strike? Probably, but the radiation will hang around for a long time. What if Breitbart decides to drop its mask of acting like Trump and the MAGA movement’s conscience and decides to begin trashing Trump? It won’t end well for them: The Left will use them as a weapon against Trump and the base will thrash them before they stop reading them.

As for the White House Leaks — why do people talk to the media at all? Because every human being has an innate need to confess. That’s why people leak to the press and why they talk to the Opposition Media. Bannon is a Catholic, but has he heard of a priest?

Bannon is a warrior and a brilliant man; White House work was not for him. He wanted out. Sigmund Freud talks about “the death drive” and that may have been an unconscious cog turning in Steve’s mind as he spoke to the media….

Bannon has an excess of Logos and Pathos, but little Ethos. He rarely helps people whom he used as an energy source. More importantly, because he shoots from the hip, he doesn’t have a good sense of Kairos, which means striking at the opportune moment, while the iron is hot. When all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail, and Steve struck without discrimination and with wild abandon, cold or hot irons. Sometimes he hit the mark. Other times — no.

Bannon runs on a frantic energy that propels him forward. During my first phone conversation with him when I was interviewing with Breitbart, he kept asking me what I thought of this and that, and kept getting more and more amped up as I reeled off my thoughts. “What do you think of immigration?” he asked. “I think it affects everything,” I said offhand as I wandered around the art section of a Barnes and Noble. “Yeah!!!!” he yelled back. Whoa, I thought as I pulled the phone away from my ringing eardrums. This job is going to be awesome. Later, I thought, did I make a mistake by not majoring in studio art and going into journalism? Maybe these people should have left well enough alone and let me draw and paint all day instead of letting the velociraptor out of the pen. “That one: When she looks at you, you can see she’s working things out.” And at eight months, Bannon’s Valkyries are what is called “lethal”… When you’re blessed with the gift of aggression and you’re permitted to use it, establishments will fall before your eyes. With one jawbone, you can dispatch an entire army.

That same energy that drives Bannon and drives me also drives many talented and intelligent people who never learned to harness their energy like the bucking bronco it is. It brings people in and then it repulses them, because every action has an equal and opposite reaction. You must learn to tame it and reign it in, so it’s yours and it doesn’t run you. Fall asleep in the lap of your vices and you’ll wake up in the hands of your enemies.

This is why I always thought it was mildly amusing when people talked about Bannon as if he was some sort of master strategist, the Bill Belichick of politics. The truth is that Bannon is a superb tactician and he isn’t a strategist at all. It was always Trump who was the strategist; what confuses people is that Trump is a better strategist than tactician even though he verbally shoots from the hip as if there is no tomorrow.

Bannon made several several mistakes – what part of DON’T TALK TO THE MEDIA is hard for the Right to understand? – but the worst one was that he judged Trump by his own standards, thinking his achievements justified a modest amount of disloyalty. But Trump always, always, always places loyalty first and foremost. That’s why he often puts more responsibility in the hands that are less than competent than one might like to see. Fortunately, what keeps this from being a fatal flaw is that he is also a strong enough executive to not hesitate to remove that responsibility once he sees they cannot handle it to his liking.

Bannon will recover because, being a tactician, he has cornerback memory. Tacticians tend to bounce back quickly, as if nothing ever happened. Once he recovers his energy, no doubt he’ll be causing serious heartburn for the mandarins of some industry, somewhere. But it could be anything; it won’t necessarily have anything to do with U.S. politics.

That being said, it’s unfortunate to see that even at the very top levels, the Right remains almost totally incapable of working productively together or looking out for each other’s interests. There are a few, a very few, who play well with others, Mike Cernovich and Stefan Molyneux being the foremost examples, but for the most part, if you’re on the Right, you’re either wholly-owned by an interest group or you’re on your own.

The year in review

Dave Barry puts it all in perspective. Some highlights:

  • Nobody seems to know how, specifically, the Russians affected the election, but everybody is pretty sure they did something, especially CNN, which has not been so excited about a story since those heady months in 2014 when it provided 24/7 video coverage of random objects floating in the Pacific while panels of experts speculated on whether those objects might or might not have anything to do with that missing Malaysian airliner. You can tune in to CNN any time, day or night, and you are virtually guaranteed to hear the word “Russians” within 10 seconds, even if it’s during a Depends commercial.
  •  NASA, in a major scientific discovery, announces that a star system less than 40 light-years away contains seven Earth-size planets, at least three of which appear to have a Starbucks.
  • On the legislative front, the big story is Obamacare, which the Republicans have been running against for seven straight years. Their message has been: “Vote for us, and we WILL get rid of Obamacare!” So now that they control the White House and both houses of Congress, there can be no stopping them. It’s time to deliver! GET READY FOR A REPUBLICAN-LEADERSHIP-STYLE BUTT-WHUPPIN’, OBAMACARE! When the smoke clears, Obamacare is sitting at the bar, unscathed, sipping a whiskey and flirting with the barmaid. Republican congressional leaders are strewn all over the barroom floor, noses bleeding, underpants pulled over their foreheads. But this setback does not deter them for long. They pick themselves up, dust themselves off, tuck themselves back in and start making plans for their next bold legislative masterstroke.
  • In aviation news, United Airlines breaks new customer-service ground when it decides that a 69-year-old passenger who has already boarded his flight must be “re-accommodated” via a technique similar to the one the Mexican army used to re-accommodate the Texans at the Alamo, leaving him with a concussion, broken teeth and a broken nose. At first United’s CEO defends the airline’s actions on the grounds that, quote, “We have the collective IQ of a starfish.” But after a firestorm of public outrage he apologizes and promises that in the future United will employ a “more humane” re-accommodation policy based on “respect for our customers and, when needed, tranquilizer darts.”
  • In other political developments, Greg Gianforte, a Republican running for Montana’s vacant congressional seat, gets national headlines when he body-slams a reporter for the Guardian newspaper. He is immediately hired as director of customer relations by United Airlines. No, seriously, despite being charged with assault, Gianforte wins easily, yet another indication that in much of the nation journalists enjoy the same level of popularity as head lice.
  • Republican congressional leaders determined to avenge their humiliating defeat at the hands of Obamacare emerge after months of closed-door meetings with a new, smarter repeal strategy. The GOP, led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch “Mojo” McConnell, is cagey about the details, but sources say the plan involves a “high cliff” and a “really heavy safe,” which the Republicans plan to purchase from the Acme Corp.
  • Meanwhile a major scandal engulfs the entertainment world when the New York Times reveals that powerful movie producer Harvey Weinstein, despite being a prominent supporter of all the correct causes, basically spent the past several decades lumbering around in an open bathrobe forcing himself on unreceptive women. This news comes as a big shock to members of the Hollywood community, especially coming on the heels of their recent discovery that the pope is Catholic.

There is considerably more in this vein. It is amusing.