RIP Whitey Herzog

damn

Defund NPR

Turley makes the case.

   The NPR CEO has responded to Uri Berliner's expose by calling it...and I'm not even making this up...: "profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning." That's like a parody of leftist puling. I mean, I guess it might be "hurtful"--after all, as they say, the truth hurts. "disrespectful" and "demeaning" are just goddamn stupid.

   I fell out of the habit of listening to NPR for a couple of years during which I didn't have to drive to campus, but could walk. I was an enthusiastic listener for decades, especially during my sometimes long commutes. When I tuned back in ca. 2015 (? '16?) I was appalled. Or maybe 'repulsed' is better. Fairly soon after I started tuning back in, I was listening to one of their talk shows and heard one of their well-known talking heads (can't remember his name now) ab. so. lutely. lose. his. shit. at one of his guests who was questioning liberal gun-control orthodoxy. I mean dude completely lost it. Needless to say, if that had been an isolated incident, NBD. But the NPR I returned to was not like the NPR I had left. New NPR didn't just lean liberal...it was filled with politically correct bullshit about race (there was a whole show about "code switching" (honestly, how does the left come up with so many irritating turns of phrase?), for example), "gender," the bad Orange Man (REEEEEEEEEEEEE) and all the other leftist obsessions. Even a solidly Democrat friend of mine said to me, years ago, that NPR had become awful, and that he couldn't even listen to it anymore...

   Anyway.

   There's no way we should pay for that shit. 

   Lefties used to refuse to pay the tax on their phone bills because it allegedly was used to pay off debt from the Vietnam war. (That's not exactly true, as I understand it.) Anyway, maybe non-leftists should withhold the nickel or whatever of their taxes that is slated for NPR propaganda operations...

Turley: The Trump Trial in Manhattan is an Indictment of the NY Legal System

It's almost unbelievable how little vocal Dems on the intertubes understand about this case...which doesn't keep them from passionately denouncing the bad Orange Man, and declaring him obviously guilty...

Trump, for all his many faults, is far less dangerous than the contemporary blue team.

Beria is no longer with us--but "show me the man and I'll show you the crime" could well be one of their many mottos.

Disagree with the blue team, and you risk "cancellation"--i.e. psychotic public campaigns of lies and character assassination--more-or-less at best. If that doesn't work: lawfare. As Turley points out:

After an absurd $450 million decision courtesy of Attorney General Letitia James, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will bring his equally controversial criminal prosecution over hush money paid to a former porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election.
Lawyers have been scouring the civil and criminal codes for any basis to sue or prosecute Trump before the upcoming 2024 election. This week will highlight the damage done to New York’s legal system because of this unhinged crusade. They’ve charged him with everything short of ripping a label off a mattress.
Just a few weeks ago, another judge imposed a roughly half billion dollar penalty in a case without a single victim who lost a single cent on loans with Trump. (Indeed, bank officials testified they wanted more business with the Trump organization).
Now Bragg is bringing a case that has taken years to develop and millions of dollars in litigation cost for all parties. That is all over a crime from before the 2016 election that is a misdemeanor under state law that had already expired under the statute of limitations.

Israel says Iran Has Launched Dozens of Drones At Them

Er...if my calculations are correct, the USA has like a half-million tons of freedom floating around in the vicinity...

If Israel is right, this is a very, very, very bad idea...

Democrat-Run St. Louis Enters Doom Loop

As mentioned at the link--if people keep voting for insane Democrat policies, eventually you have to basically conclude that these are the kinds of policies and cities they want...

Mad Mandy Marcotte: Men punching random women in NYC: A desperate last gasp of the male rage fueling MAGA

LLOoooOOLolLOoOOoOolLoL

Yeah, yeah...one might argue that making fun of Mandy is not exactly sporting...but she's really no loonier than the average pop lefty squawker...sez me...

Some excerpts:

Whatever the excuse the angry man concocts, the impetus is always the same: The eyes of a woman are directed at someone or something that is not him, and he is indignant over it. So he will make sure she has no choice but to look at him, either by getting in her face or — in these alarming New York cases — punching her. If he cannot capture her adoring gaze, well, he will make her stare at him in fear. 

These stories resonate, as well, because the nation is having a moment of increasingly unhinged male fury at women for daring to have lives that are centered around something other than catering to a man's every whim. Unleashed by Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, there's an upswell of loud male entitlement shouting at us from every corner.

And:

The rise of MAGA is fueled by misogyny. But it's less a backlash than a tantrum, a rage explosion by men who want to restore their dominance but fear that, this time, women won't buckle to their bullying.

Look, here's the deal, Mands:

The punchers are not MAGA. They're not conservative at all. They're not mainly white, to be perfectly honest about it. (Remember the video of the woman walking around NYC getting catcalled...but it had to be edited and then disappeared because the vast majority of the perpetrators weren't the right color? i.e. weren't evilwhitemen?) Too bad for your worldview, these assailants--the real ones--aren't going to turn out to be of the right demographic to support your nuttery. 

   And, of course, some of the stories will likely turn out to be made up for social media clout (as it were)...

   If this were a conservative phenomenon, it would be showing up in the middle of the country. But it isn't. And it isn't.

   (Incidentally, this sounds an awful lot like "the knockout game"....which people like you, Mands, deny is real. But when it happens--though of course it isn't real--it's normally not evilwhitemales who are doing the punching...)

   This is happening because your faction, the progressive left, has pursued policies that increase violent crime by refusing to take its perpetrators off the streets...not to mention the fact that it intentionally promotes violence against whites by pumping up the hatred and resentment against them... Asians seems to end up on the receiving end as well--after all, they are "white adjacent"...

   Marcotte's a loon. But she's really just a mouthpiece for the leftist zeitgeist, looking for a way to blame the right for the consequences of the left's abject insanity.

F-15E--Now With More EPAWSS!

link

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.: A(nother) Disinformation October Surprise is Coming

Well, I disagree.

   Not about the historical claims--about those, Jenkins is exactly right. 

   I just don't believe they'll try it again.

   But if they're losing...all bets are off.

   Jenkins is right, IMO, that we face two dark paths: Trump and the elite-left establishment. And, like Jenkins, I (currently, at least) think that the latter is more dangerous. 

   The first comment below the story is telling--many Democrats continue to deny the plain facts we have uncovered about Russia- and Laptop-gates. Go on Twitter and you'll soon enough find the same thing. Last night on Twitter I learned that, not only did Mueller not acquit Trump...he didn't even investigate the "collusion" charges! Didn't even! Investigate! Can you believe it? The things one can learn by reading leftists speaking their minds...

   But, somehow, though the collusion charges were never investigated...they were actually proven true! Mirabile dictu! 

   And Clinton and the Dems had nothing to do with fabricating evidence in Russiagate! All they did was commission opposition research...and then, innocently, credulously, pass it along...

   Like babes in the woods, those Dems.

   One almost feels sorry for them...wonders how they've survived this long...

   But...uh...don't forget...they were actually right all along and Trump is still a Russian "asset" "colluding" with Putin...and the more this is disproven...er...I mean...not disproven...the truer it becomes!

   Also, Biden has been proven innocent of money-laundering shenanigans!

   I didn't know half this stuff!

   You could teach a kind of applied epistemology course just on Russiagate. Or, if you insist on balance, you could throw in Iraqi WMDs to boot.

   But in politics, bizarre variations on skepticism abound.

   Here are things we know:

   Trump did not "collude" with the Rooskies.

   Russiagate was a Democrat dirty trick.

   Here's something we don't quite know...but it's a pretty safe bet:

   Biden and his family were running an influence-peddling operation. 

   But the left-wing echo chamber has it that the disproven things are proven...but for the nearly-proven thing, there is no evidence at all....

   Abject madness.

   Many conservatives worked hard to pretend that the WMD hypothesis was still alive, long past the point at which it was a dead issue. Not yet conclusively disproven! could have been their battle-cry. Every now and then there would be a rumor that some Americans had dug up a long-buried chlorine gas artillery shell, and some righties would come out of the woodwork to claim that this was proof of the predicate for the war. Absurd, of course. We didn't invade Iraq in order to find a couple-hundred pounds of chemical ordnance...

   Anyway.

   The truly daft faction of progressives is now so religiously devoted to Trump fantasies that they will never give them up. They're religious. It's like asking Christians to give up the virgin birth. They are no longer capable of evaluating their faith objectively.

   Oh, fuck it.

   What a tragic waste of the human spirit.

   I'm going to the gym.

Fallout, Episode 1

Bleh.

Why mangle the plot if you're going to make it so much worse?

Gratuitous trans. Wow. So original. So edgy.

WTF the Brotherhood of Steel in the first episode?

Not terrible I guess...but not good.

NPR In Turmoil After It Is Accused of Liberal Bias

You really can't make this shit up...

This is rather like NPR In Turmoil After It Is Accused Of Making Radio Programs...

Johnson or Poilievre?

Am I the only one who has a hard time telling Mike Johnson and Pierre Poilievre apart?

To the Surprise of Exactly Zero Reasonable People, "Gender-Affirming Medicine" Doesn't Work

Unless your bullshit-detector is basically nonfunctional, this can't come as any surprise to you.

More on Gamergate 2

link

   It's really just the culture war / political correctness / Woketarianism as it manifests itself in video games. Very Serious People ignored Gamergate--or sided with the bad guys. But it foreshadowed the cultural catastrophe we're in now. I doubt that Gamergate 2 means things are going to get worse--now this sort of thing is everywhere, and almost routine. But it's too bad people weren't smarter about Gamergate 1. Basically, it was about the SJWs/PCs/Woketarians taking over video games journalism. When gamers rightly complained about the totalitarian takeover of their hobby, they were accused of racism, harassment, etc.--now this, too, is routine. Any opposition to political correctness is characterized as bigotry and "violence." 

   There's a kind of moral/aesthetic worldview at the core of the left that "valorizes" (one of the paleo-PC's favorite words) grotesquerie and destruction. Of course there's a lot of violence and destruction in video games--but there's generally also heroism and some kind of laudable ideals buried in there somewhere.

   Or something like that.

"How Taxpayers Will Heavily Subsidize Democrat Boots on the Ground This Election"

The private funding of Democrat election-influencing projects is itself a huge problem. Now your tax dollars are apparently going to be put to that use.

   Though, as the article notes, that's already been happening. I remember watching the stream of vans from campus to the polls in 2008. Even at the time, though a benighted Democrat, I was concerned. Encouraging college students to vote and funneling them to the polls is basically a Democrat GOTV project. Universities basically feed their students leftist propaganda, and then drive them to the polls. And a large percentage of universities are publicly-funded, needless to say. 

   I've seldom been a fan of anything but the most modest GOTV efforts. Reminding people to vote is one thing. Basically badgering people, registering people who neither know nor care enough to do so on their own, etc....this has almost always seemed to me to be a bad idea. I did engage in some of this for the Dems back in the day--but I was wrong to do so. For most of my life I've thought that anyone who doesn't care enough to vote probably doesn't know enough to vote.

John Eastman: Setting the Record Straight on the Trump Electoral Count Argument

I'm (obviously) not a lawyer, but, contrary to conventional wisdom, the argument doesn't seem absurd.

NOW: Opposing Men Taking Over Women's Sports is White Supremacy

LOOOOOL

More Mad Libs from the left...

Seriously, how could you make this stuff up? The National Organization for Women...coming out in support of men...pretending to be women...invading and wrecking women's sports....and....as if that weren't enough!....just grabbing a completely unrelated ad hominem accusation out of the leftist bin to launch at people who disagree: white supremacy!!! 

LOOOOOOOOOOOOL

Look, all the other crazy-ass bullshit about this to the side....it has not a goddamn thing to do with race or "white supremacy"... I realize that's one of the hottest leftist spittle-flecked insults of the moment...but...whatever happened to "transphobia?" I mean, that would at least be relevant... "White supremacy" (though...that's never what they're really talking about, of course) is no more relevant than....well, hell, why not just say "settler colonialism?" That would be no less irrelevant. And it's really hottt right now, what with Gaza and everything. Or genocide--that's another hot one. 

In fact 'genocide' is kind of a leftist blast from the past. Back in the paleo-PC era, everything was a "kind of rape" or a "form of genocide." Nothing was just bad or wrong...well...being "offensive" was, of course. Everything was "offensive." "Offensive" was the pale-PC version of the neo-PC "problematic"--the all-purpose complaint. But anyway. If you really wanted to bitch about something, you had to find some convoluted, baroque, impressionistic (and never even vaguely plausible) way of analogizing it to rape or genocide. 

Though...there doesn't seem to even be any attempt explain the "white supremacy" accusation.

C'mon, NOW--you're not even trying here. 

This is the difference between second-rate bullshit and the third-rate variety.

NOW, I am disappoint...

The Illegal Alien Invasion Is Not *Technically* An Invasion

facepalm