Tag: media

(((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.

An interview with Bono

I wish the media would do more significant interviews of this sort with artists, writers, and politicians. It’s a bit of a swan song for both interviewer and interviewee, and it actually provides genuine insight into the man, who is more interesting than one would have imagined from his public posturings:

Performers are very insecure people. Gavin Friday, his line to me years and years ago was “Insecurity is your best security for a performer.” A performer needs to know what is going on in the room and feel the room, and you don’t feel the room if you are normal, if you’re whole. If you have any great sense of self, you wouldn’t be that vulnerable to either the opinions of others or the love and the applause and the approval of others.

The whole event enriched the album, though – talk about an experience.

But isn’t that great? I thought Experience would be more contemplative, and it has got that side, but the heart of the album is the spunk and the punk and the drive of it. There is a sort of youthfulness about it. A lot of the tempos are up. And it has some of the funniest lines, I think. “Dinosaur wonders why he still walks the Earth.” I mean, I started that line about myself.

Being a dinosaur?

Yeah, of course, but then I started to think about it in terms of what is going on around the world. And I thought, “Gosh, democracy, the thing that I have grown up with all my life . . . that’s what’s really facing an extinction event.”

In an interview that you and I did in 2005, you said this: “Our definition of art is breaking open the breastbone, for sure. Just open-heart surgery. I wish there were an easier way, but people want blood, and I am one of them.”

Life and death and art . . . all of them bloody businesses.

How did your faith get you through all of this?

The person who wrote best about love in the Christian era was Paul of Tarsus, who became Saint Paul. He was a tough fucker. He is a superintellectual guy, but he is fierce and he has, of course, the Damascene experience. He goes off and lives as a tentmaker. He starts to preach, and he writes this ode to love, which everybody knows from his letter to the Corinthians: “Love is patient, love is kind. . . . Love bears all things, love believes all things” – you hear it at a lot of weddings. How do you write these things when you are at your lowest ebb? ‘Cause I didn’t. I didn’t. I didn’t deepen myself. I am looking to somebody like Paul, who was in prison and writing these love letters and thinking, “How does that happen? It is amazing.”

Now, it doesn’t cure him of all, of what he thinks of women or gay people or whatever else, but within his context he has an amazingly transcendent view of love. And I do believe that the darkness is where we learn to see. That is when we see ourselves clearer – when there is no light.

You asked me about my faith. I had a sense of suffocation. I am a singer, and everything I do comes from air. Stamina, it comes from air. And in this process, I felt I was suffocating. That was the most frightening thing that could happen to me because I am in pain. Ask Ali. She said I wouldn’t notice if I had a knife sticking out of my back. I would be like, “Huh, what is that?” But this time last year, I felt very alone and very frightened and not able to speak and not able to even explain my fear because I was kind of . . .

When you felt like you were suffocating?

Yeah. But, you know, people have had so much worse to deal with, so that is another reason not to talk about it. You demean all the people who, you know, never made it through that or couldn’t get health care!

Do you feel like you lucked out?

Lucked out? I am the fucking luckiest man on Earth. I didn’t think that I had a fear of a fast exit. I thought it would be inconvenient ’cause I have a few albums to make and kids to see grow up and this beautiful woman and my friends and all of that. But I was not that guy. And then suddenly you are that guy. And you think, “I don’t want to leave here. There’s so much more to do.” And I’m blessed. Grace and some really clever people got me through, and my faith is strong.

I read the Psalms of David all the time. They are amazing. He is the first bluesman, shouting at God, “Why did this happen to me?” But there’s honesty in that too. . . . And, of course, he looked like Elvis. If you look at Michelangelo’s sculpture, don’t you think David looks like Elvis?

Never forget that you can always learn from those who are intelligent and successful, even when you disagree with them. In fact, you can often learn more important things from those with whom you disagree, simply because their perspective is so fundamentally different than your own.

Auto-deleted or banned?

Regardless of the reason, the Twitter account of Julian Assange has disappeared:

The official Twitter account of controversial Wikileaks founder Julian Assange — @JulianAssange — isn’t showing up.

Instead, anyone trying to reach it gets this message: Sorry that page doesn’t exist.

It wasn’t clear whether the account was suspended or deleted by Twitter or Assange himself — or why or for how long. Twitter wasn’t commenting.

The official Wikileaks Twitter account was still live but wasn’t mentioning the Assange account.

An account purporting to be an alternative Assange account was claiming Twitter had deleted his official one ahead of a blockbuster story he’s preparing to break. There was no confirmation that Assange was authoring that alternative account — and that account has now been suspended by Twitter.

But did it do so of the account owner’s volition or not? That is the question. The one thing that is clear is that Assange’s account wasn’t perma-suspended like mine. But as to whether it was Twitter or Assange who deleted the account, we can’t know until one of them accepts or rejects responsibility. My assumption is that Assange deleted it himself, because Twitter seems to prefer the softer approach of permanent suspensions to outright bans.

Over the target

Mike Cernovich did an AMA this week and not only did the SJWs came out in droves to try to attack him, but their counterparts in the media immediately leaped to try to set the Narrative about it in textbook SJW fashion.

Right–wing Pizzagate peddler, conspiracy theorist blowhard, and attention–seeker Mike Cernovich held an AMA on Reddit on Friday. But it didn’t really go anywhere because Cernovich spent most of the time dodging questions and responding with questions of his own rather than providing anyone with any real answers. Which is the opposite of what an AMA is supposed to be.

Anyone familiar with Cernovich—who most recently went after MSNBC contributor Sam Seder over a joke tweet and briefly got him fired—won’t be surprised by any of this. Any exposure for Cernovich, who claims he is a “journalist” and is peddling his book, “Gorilla Mindset: How to Control Your Thoughts and Emotions and Live Life on Your Terms,” is a good thing and helps those donations continue to flow.

If you’re not really familiar with Cernovich’s “work,” all you need to know is that he authored blog posts like, “When in Doubt, Whip it Out,” and not even Alex Jones can really stand him. Some of Cernovich’s best work can be seen here.

On Reddit, the AMA’s first question pretty much set the tone for the entire thing: “Mike, buddy, big fan, long time listener – my question – how do you wake up every morning and resist the urge to swallow a bullet knowing that your lasting memory on this planet will amount to nothing more than a fecal stain on humanity?” a Redditor named MrZissman asked.

Cernovich attacked the question with an eagerness that quickly waned as the session dragged on. “I sleep like a champ and wake up energized every day. How’s your life going?”

This is somehow supposed to be news? Look at the headlines of these articles, and remember, they are about a freaking Reddit AMA.

Mike Cernovich Hounded on Rape Allegation in Reddit AMA
– Daily Beast

Mike Cernovich’s Reddit AMA Backfires Spectacularly
– Splinter

Mike Cernovich Did A Reddit AMA And Got Relentlessly Dunked On
– Digg

Alt-Right Troll Mike Cernovich Gets Ass Handed to Him in Reddit AMA
– SF Weekly

Mike Cernovich’s AMA Went About As Well As You’d Expect
– NY Mag

How does an AMA backfire? How is “SJWs falsely accuse people they don’t like and call them names” supposed to be significant or noteworthy in any way? And how long will it be before we see this sort of “story” appear in the Jeff Bezos blog?

All these attacks actually accomplished was to demonstrate two things we already knew:

  1. Mike Cernovich is too big to ignore
  2. SJWs always lie

Storm is the New Pizza

Q is hereby confirmed to be legitimate; the mainstream media is going into full attack mode:

A new conspiracy theory called “The Storm” has taken the grimiest parts of the internet by, well, storm. Like Pizzagate, the Storm conspiracy features secret cabals, a child sex-trafficking ring led (in part) by the satanic Democratic Party, and of course, countless logical leaps and paranoid assumptions that fail to hold up under the slightest fact-based scrutiny. However, unlike Pizzagate, the Storm isn’t focused on a single block of shops in D.C., or John Podesta’s emails. It’s much, much bigger than that.

As most terrible things do, this story begins with a post on /pol/, a sub-board of the more-or-less-anonymous, anything-goes website 4chan. Over the last few years, /pol/ — which technically stands for “politically incorrect” — has slowly but surely become a top contender for the ever-coveted title of the most upsetting community online. It’s the sort of place where neo-Nazis and people who believe women shouldn’t have basic human rights used to meet before we started verifying them on Twitter and electing them to public office. And as of late, it’s expanded its ranks to include fringe members of all shapes and sizes.

On October 28, someone calling themselves Q began posting a series of cryptic messages in a /pol/ thread titled “Calm Before the Storm” (assumedly in reference to that creepy Trump quote from early October). Q claimed to be a high-level government insider with Q clearance (hence the name) tasked with posting intel drops — which he, for some reason, called “crumbs” — straight to 4chan in order to covertly inform the public about POTUS’s master plan to stage a countercoup against members of the deep state. It was, in short, absolutely insane.

Also, Jimmy Saville was selflessly devoted to children, Dennis Hastert just loved wrestling with high school boys, John Podesta merely has the same highly refined tastes in office decor that his brother does for the home, and Harvey Weinstein happens to be highly attractive to young actresses due to his influence in Hollywood.

As for those absurd rumors about Kevin Spacey and Marion Zimmer Bradley, they are absolutely insane.

I’m always mystified by the claims that Pizzagate has been “debunked” because an actor showed up at the restaurant in DC and fired a single shot at the floor. It’s a bizarre pseudo-argument that doesn’t even rise to the level of logical fallacy; they might as legitimately claim that Pizzagate has been debunked because Adrian Peterson had a 100-yard rushing game for the Arizona Cardinals.

One thing I learned from editing The Last Closet is that where there is such sulfuric smoke, there is almost certainly considerably more fire than anyone ever imagines.

Why can how be so?

The media finds it hard to grasp the obvious fact that people simply don’t believe them anymore:

The critics loved “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” — The Times’s Manohla Dargis raved about it, and she wasn’t alone. Rotten Tomatoes, aggregating critics’ reviews, rated the latest chapter in the saga 93 percent fresh. But fans? Not so much. At least if you go by Rotten Tomatoes, which says moviegoers posting on its site rated the film 56 percent fresh.

But wait! CinemaScore, which conducts exit polls at theaters (that is, it talks to actual, live human beings), says moviegoers gave “The Last Jedi” a solid A. And the box office was stratospheric: $450 million worldwide in one weekend, making it the second biggest opening ever.

What’s going on? There are several theories:

1) It’s straight-up trolling. Deadline.com pointed out that nothing prevents the same person from repeatedly logging onto Rotten Tomatoes and dragging down the audience score. (And one Facebook user claims to have done just that.)

2) The adventures of Rey and company (including the villainous Snoke) were genuinely disappointing. As the Hollywood Reporter noted, fans hoped that the writer-director Rian Johnson’s follow-up to “The Force Awakens” would explain, among other mysteries, who Rey’s parents are, and the answer (nobody special) wasn’t very satisfying.

3) It’s a function of how the internet has affected fandom. Vanity Fair argues that the web fosters the kind of scrutiny that few films can withstand.

On Facebook, we asked what you thought of the movie and what explains the divide between fans and critics. More than 800 responses suggested that perhaps the Rotten Tomatoes fan rating wasn’t so far off. A lot of you really did not like “The Last Jedi.”

The truth is that post-GamerGate, only idiots and SJWs pay any attention to what the critics, who are at best converged and at worst corrupted and in the direct pay of the content-producing corporations, say anymore. And in this particular case, the movie not only sucked, but betrayed multiple generations of fans.

UPDATE: After 4 days, TLJ is already underperforming TFA by $46.5 million and 19.2 percent. By comparison, Attack of the Clones outperformed The Phantom Menace by $25 million and 26.4 percent. That means that despite the massive numbers, in terms of expectations it is a box office bomb. If the fall-off picks up pace, and based on the media’s defensiveness I suspect it will, TLJ will take in less than two-thirds of what TFA did.

President of ESPN resigns

Their executives being on drugs would explain a lot of ESPN’s crazy decisions these last few years. Then again, perhaps what the evil creatures of Disney force their minions to do to keep their jobs requires a considerable amount of self-medication:

ESPN President John Skipper announced Monday he is resigning from the network due to a substance addiction problem.

“I have struggled for many years with a substance addiction. I have decided that the most important thing I can do right now is to take care of my problem,” Skipper said in a statement.

Skipper said he and the company have “mutually agreed” it was appropriate for him to resign. “I come to this public disclosure with embarrassment, trepidation and a feeling of having let others I care about down,” Skipper’s statement continued. “As I deal with this issue and what it means to me and my family, I ask for appropriate privacy and a little understanding.”

Of course, it is not impossible that this is related to the rumored storm in the works, as yesterday’s shut down of the Atlanta airport allegedly was.