Home » Open thread 5/19/21

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Open thread 5/19/21 — 29 Comments

  1. My fav law school professor always said, “Ignorance is bliss. Truly bliss.”

    The masses are all in on the idea that solar is cheap and renewable. It’s actually expensive, unreliable, depends on Chinese slave labor and big time mining.

  2. h/t The College Fix

    Be fascinated to meet the people who were denied admission to Stanford, VCU, and Berkeley to make a place for these three.

  3. As Art Deco’s posts show, we are now to the point where outright vile racism is just fine as long as it’s directed at white people. Just doesn’t seem that long ago to me that we were edging even closer to MLK’s vision, then Obama arrived and it’s been downhill ever since.

  4. I am amused by the dozens of articles about masking confusion and borderline hysteria. Of course, California is on the cutting edge of useless masking requirements, with state officials claiming that they want vaccination percentages to increase before relaxing the rules. I’ve noticed recently, that CA has begun to spend millions of taxpayer funds on PSA TV advertising to promote vaccination.

    Looking at the actual vaccination data, it looks like New England and NJ are killing it, and California is actually doing well. Maybe Newsome is holding out for Fauci’s 90% level. (joke, … I hope.)

    This CDC vaccination page is interesting.

    The US map of vaccinations is particularly of interest. However, it comes up in “View: Total Doses” which I don’t think is the most useful mode.

    Try this one:

    View: People . . Show: At least one dose . . Metric: % of population
    Population: Population > 18 yoa

    IMO, this probably best reflects the approach towards herd immunity. Too bad they don’t add in unvaccinated but recovered numbers.

  5. There were two ballot questions in yesterday’s election PA that would limit the emergency powers of the Governor. Very much a slam dunk to vote YES on both of these, especially in a state where Wolf is the governor and Rachel Levine was the Secretary of Health advising Wolf during the lockdowns (while moving his/her mother out of a care facility even as she directed nursing homes to take in COVID patients).
    The result in my once red county? Election Day Yes – 52000, Election Day No – 49000, Mail In Yes – 9500, Mail In No – 45000. Why in hell are there nearly 55000 mail-in votes? And of these, how is it possible that nearly 82% of these votes are NO votes?
    Luckily, statewide the yes vote carried, but barely… 1.08M to 939K.

  6. Steph:

    It seems the PA mail in vote selection machine is still in service but needs a late night ballot dump to gain the desired outcome. The minions better get this sorted out by 2022. Can’t have actual voters making actual decisions.

    I thought the guy was Richard Levine; the PA Secretary of Health? Putting lipstick on a pig, or a wig on a Dick, doesn’t make a Rachel.

  7. Leftoxenomorphs are very adept at infecting, getting promoted to leadership positions, gatekeeping, spreading the infection, waiting out old timers that go into retirement and / or firing them by phony accusations and persecutions, killing an institution and then wearing its skin for camouflage, pretense, propaganda, power and influence.

    The institution doesn’t exist anymore.

    It died.

    It died of a leftoxenomorphism infection that spread and killed it.

    There’s nothing left in the institution that is not leftoxenomorph.

    It’s just the skin moving like on its own but inside there’s only leftoxenomorph maggots.

    It’s former nature, gone. Its life extinguished.

    It’s rotting dead skin still moving but now serving other beings.

    Yes, it is the notion out of a horror movie nightmare.

    The rotting, smelling, falling in shreds, skin of a dead being now inhabited by the maggots that killed it trying to simulate the former being for their own purposes that bid no good for the world.

    That is what the leftoxenomorph “Long March Through the Institutions” means and was and now it is all but complete.

    Who is wearing the skin of the FBI, the IRS, the SD and all the rest of the putrid, cancerous organization?

    Who is wearing the skin of America?

  8. George Banner:

    One of the biggest problems is that the ruse works. Most people are unaware of what has happened. Therefore, if someone tries to inform them, that person comes off as a paranoid conspiracy theorist and perhaps even insane.

  9. A few days ago we were told we could stop wearing masks at work if we provide corporate with a copy of our vaccine card. Today we’re told to go back to wearing masks regardless and the policy is being reconsidered.

    Only takes one paranoid client to fark things up for everybody

  10. Just doesn’t seem that long ago to me that we were edging even closer to MLK’s vision, then Obama arrived and it’s been downhill ever since.

    As far as I’m aware, the only person in King’s camarilla who was ever a public critic of racial-preference schemes was Bayard Rustin. Mr. Rustin landed a job on the research staff of the AFL-CIO ca. 1965 and was in subsequent years seen in print in working papers and low circulation periodicals like Dissent and The New Republic. He had no influence in black organizations the last 20-odd years of his life. More specifically, I’m not aware any of King’s family objected to the trajectory of stances offered by the SCLC or the NAACP or the Urban League over the years. (Some of them probably objected when the SCLC fired Martin King III for absenteeism). Change my mind.

    What’s going on now is crude, stupid, and vicious to a degree that is novel, but its much more a difference in degree than in kind in comparison with the situation as it was 20 years ago. Obama didn’t generate this. Obama’s a spiteful twerp who indubitably encouraged some of the worst tendencies in the upper stratum of the Democratic Party, but he’s too much of an empty suit to have the kind of influence you posit he has.

  11. Art Deco:

    I’ve read tons of essays on just how dedicated King was to affirmative action and what he might have said today about it. So I’ll just say that there were some contradictory things he said, but on the whole I think he favored it. As for his family, as far as I know, Alveda King (his niece) is quite conservative and spoken against it.

    Personally, I don’t base my own opinion of affirmative action on the opinion of King or any member of his family, but I know a lot of people consider those opinions very important (although less so today than in the past).

    As for Obama, I have never seen him as an empty suit and I’ve written many posts on that subject. He certainly didn’t do things alone, but he was definitely a force and he definitely changed things (almost entirely for the worse, in my opinion). Not only did he make the DOJ more radical, but he also was instrumental in moving the Overton Window in our “conversations” about race. I noticed it and wrote about it even during the 2008 campaign. Among other things, he immunized himself against criticism by pre-emptively calling those would criticize him racists. He also started saying things like calling his grandmother a “typical white person”. One of many posts I wrote on the topic of Obama was this one:

    The phrase “typical white” as a form of criticism by people in public life (particularly on Twitter) has been normed and is quite common. And it goes without saying that if the roles were reversed, and a prominent white person (other than an ostracized neo-Nazi) derisively called someone a “typical” anything else (black, Muslim, whatever protected victim identity one can think of), the sky would fall on the person issuing the statement. But “typical white person” is rather typical these days, and merits hardly a squeak of protest—except, of course, from “typical white people.”

    And it was none other than Barack Obama who began this trend. I well remember the moment he began to describe his white grandmother as a racist—it made me gasp when he said it. Obama was trying to do damage control when the nature of his mentor Rev. Wright was being publicized during the 2008 campaign:

    “I can no more disown [pastor Wright] than I can my white grandmother—a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

    That was followed by a radio interview in which Obama called that same grandmother a “typical white person”:

    He was asked about his grandmother’s reaction to his potentially being president.

    “She’s extremely proud,” he said. “The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t. But she’s a typical white person who — if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn’t know — there’s a reaction that’s been bred into our experiences that don’t go away, and that sometimes come out in the wrong way, and that’s just the nature of race in our society. We have to break through it. And what makes me optimistic is you see each generation feeling a little less like that.”

    Sounds so very gentle compared to Sarsour, doesn’t it? But it is a demonization of white people as typically being racists, which opened the door to what is now a far more extremely-stated version of that sort of “white people bad” sentiment.

    It could have gone differently. Obama didn’t have to do this. But he chose to do this. It wasn’t just about defending himself regarding Wright, either. There were numerous other occasions during the 2008 campaign on which he played the race card, as I described here.

    And by the way, Obama misrepresented (in other words, lied) about what had happened to his grandmother. While a candidate, he made it sound as though she had simply been afraid of black men on the street because they were black men. But he had told a different story earlier, in his book. I dealt with that in this post:

    And please read what actually happened to Obama’s grandmother as he previously related the story in his book. Turns out she was nearly mugged, and her allegedly racist comment was made not in front of Obama but reported secondhand by his grandfather. Obama’s grandmother appears to have mentioned to the grandfather that the aggressive panhandler who bothered her was black, and the grandfather told Obama that was the real reason she was afraid.

  12. [Q] George Banner: One of the biggest problems is that the ruse works. Most people are unaware of what has happened. Therefore, if someone tries to inform them, that person comes off as a paranoid conspiracy theorist and perhaps even insane. [/Q]

    Yes, Sir, it does.

    The leftoxenomorph take over of America and Western civilization is one of the most evil but technically greatest achievements in the annals of conflict and war. And it gives PSYOPS their due. Not one pitched battle. Their enemy demoralized and giving up in disgust. A true infection from within.

    Leftoxenomorphism is a religion taking over where other religions failed to adapt and where philosophy couldn’t yet fill out the void.

    Leftoxenomorphism is following on the footsteps of other religions deeply embedded in the history of mankind offering basically the same pattern.
    The most consistent wins even if the consistency refers to a sham.

    Humans need philosophy. Religion used to provide some answers. But failed. Leftoxenomorphism rushes in to fill the void. Masterfully.

    Leftoxenomorphism is masterfully tailored to the modern world.

    Most of the youth of today adhere, one way or another, some with some hesitancy, many rabidly fanatically, to the religion of leftoxenomorphism.

    Leftoxenomorphism is the greatest triumphant con, ever.

    They are taking over the planet and the rest of us are just watching in awe.

    The Frankfurt School and cultural marxism win the day.

    They understood the structure of the building of civilization so they knew where to place a small amount of philosophical explosives and watch the whole thing fail using its own weight to destroy it.

    The only way out would have to be violent but, again, we are defeated by our own achievements because we built such a safe and comfortable civilization that war was taken away from us and with the sham of modern “democracy” being a sacrament of leftoxenomorphism the 2nd Amendment has been annulled.

    There is no point in having arms if we are not going to use them.

    And war is the only way out.

    We won’t vote ourselves out of this hole.

    Leftoxenomorphs are too good at what they do to allow it.

    Leftoxenomorphs may seem insane, they are not.
    Leftoxenomorphs may seem stupid and many of the lower ants surely are but the nomenklatura is not.
    Leftoxenomorphs may seem inane but they are as serious as a bullet between the eyes.
    Leftoxenomorphs may seem full of BS but today they own the world.
    Leftoxenomorphs have been working at the final push for way more than a hundred years. And working hard.

    We didn’t pay enough attention.
    We didn’t take them seriously enough.
    We let them take over . . . everything . . . just everything . . .

    We all know what happens when we let an infection develop unchecked for too long.
    It kills you.
    Our civilization is dying.

  13. MLK was a proven plagiarist dedicated to running trains in hotel rooms on White Women Groupies. One gets tired of hearing of this pious ventilated .. errr Martyred fraud.

    Can we have more about St Thomas Sowell and his Tar Paper Shack please? I’ve got a soft spot for his taste in high end old school photographic kit (Looks like he’s slinging a Linhof Technika at the Grand Canyon).

    Make no mistake, St Thomas is a very good photographer. He’s read his Ansel Adams closely and admittedly has got better politics than *that* sainted museum piece ever had. IIRC Adams made a point of dumping on Reagan in his last book.

  14. Nonapod – that was an interesting anti-hack tip, but the prior post on that site was even more .. interesting.

    https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/05/darkside-ransomware-gang-quits-after-servers-bitcoin-stash-seized/

    May 14, 2021191 Comments
    The DarkSide ransomware affiliate program responsible for the six-day outage at Colonial Pipeline this week that led to fuel shortages and price spikes across the country is running for the hills. The crime gang announced it was closing up shop after its servers were seized and someone drained the cryptocurrency from an account the group uses to pay affiliates.

    “Servers were seized (country not named), money of advertisers and founders was transferred to an unknown account,” reads a message from a cybercrime forum reposted to the Russian OSINT Telegram channel.

    The DarkSide message includes passages apparently penned by a leader of the REvil ransomware-as-a-service platform. This is interesting because security experts have posited that many of DarkSide’s core members are closely tied to the REvil gang.

    The REvil representative said its program was introducing new restrictions on the kinds of organizations that affiliates could hold for ransom, and that henceforth it would be forbidden to attack those in the “social sector” (defined as healthcare and educational institutions) and organizations in the “gov-sector” (state) of any country. Affiliates also will be required to get approval before infecting victims.

    The new restrictions came as some Russian cybercrime forums began distancing themselves from ransomware operations altogether. On Thursday, the administrator of the popular Russian forum XSS announced the community would no longer allow discussion threads about ransomware moneymaking programs.

    “There’s too much publicity,” the XSS administrator explained. “Ransomware has gathered a critical mass of nonsense, bullshit, hype, and fuss around it. The word ‘ransomware’ has been put on a par with a number of unpleasant phenomena, such as geopolitical tensions, extortion, and government-backed hacks. This word has become dangerous and toxic.”

    In a blog post on the DarkSide closure, cyber intelligence firm Intel 471 said it believes all of these actions can be tied directly to the reaction related to the high-profile ransomware attacks covered by the media this week.

    And will most likely change names and resume operations when the heat is off.

    Who knew cybercrime had its own rules and hierarchies? Kind of like the Mobs.

    Here is how they operate.
    https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/05/a-closer-look-at-the-darkside-ransomware-gang/

    Just like any personal services business.

  15. Can we have more about St Thomas Sowell and his Tar Paper Shack please?

    Your real problem is the conceit that there is anything of value between your ears.

  16. Good news, even while the world burns:

    The excellent young soprano Patricia Janecková has got some new tracks up on YouTube.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XLgsUn9vEM

    Ms Janecková appears to have been partaking merrily of Knedlíky and other Czech delicacies during this past Plague Year. She’s manifesting a certain heftiness which she did not before. However does not seem to have harmed her singing one little bit.

  17. George Banner explains his neologism.
    IMO it’s a bit unwieldy for common use, especially since “lefty” covers much of the same territory these days, but it might serve to differentiate the basically clueless fellow travelers (useful idiots who are buying the snake oil) from the ultra-left activists who really do want to kill their opponents (mostly us, but sometimes their nominal allies), and aren’t shy about saying so.

    https://americandigest.org/yes-this-is-nothing-like-a-civil-rights-movement/#comment-38683

    I took “xenomorph” from the movie franchise “Alien” and added the “lefto”

    “Xenomorph” translates to “strange form” from Greek xenos=strange and morphe=form.

    It may be easier to see it as lefto – xeno – morph.

    Leftist strange beings.

    (a) By their own will having abandoned the human kind.
    (b) Alien to human life.
    (c) Utterly hostile to human life.

    If you have known somebody before they became a leftoxenomorph and meet them afterwards, it is as frightening as meeting a Hitler’s Youth after the nazis brainwashed them.

    The last sentence rings a chime with a lot of comments here and on other conservative sites.

  18. [Q] AesopFan on May 20, 2021 at 8:03 pm said:
    George Banner explains his neologism. [/Q]

    What is a leftoxenomorph?

    Any individual who is willing to abandon humanity to regress, deteriorate and degenerate into a sub-human ant-like thing of a rabid, fanatical, jihadist leftism and practices the religion of leftoxenomorphism.

    What is leftoxenomorphism?

    Leftoxenomorphism is a con or more precisely a collection of cons in the form of a religious dogma encompassing (but not exhausted at) the following concepts and incorporating the ideas and strategies and actions of the following characters and organizations:

    “believe all women” + “Build Back Better” types + “cancel culture” + “cashless society” peddlers + “Common Core” peddlers + “‘evidence’ is whatever we say it is because reasons” + “Great Reset” types + “islam is a religion of peace” types + “lived experiences” + “New World Order” types + “One World Government” types +

    “Open Society” types + “‘proof’ is whatever we say it is because reasons” + “‘science’ is whatever we say it is because reasons” + “women don’t lie” + “World Economic Forum” + Alfred Schmidt + all whites are racists + Antifa + Antonio Gramsci + Axel Honneth + Bertolt Brecht + BLM + brutalism + Carl Grünberg + climate change +

    Cloward-Piven Strategy + George Soros and his collaborators and enablers and protectors + collectivism + totalitarianism + communism + critical-(whatever)-theory + cultural marxism + Edward R Murrow + Erich Fromm + Fabian Society + fascism + feminazism + Frances Fox Piven + Frankfurt School + Friedrich Engels + Friedrich Pollock + Georg Lukacs +

    gleichschaltung (the 1930s nazification process of “all the same by force”) + Antonio Gramsci + gynofascism + Herbert Marcuse + homonazism + Institute for Social Research + intersectionality (bullshitsectionality) + Jacques Derrida + Jean-François Lyotard + John Dewey, + Jürgen Habermas + Karl Marx + Leo Löwenthal +

    liberals (American slang, they are, of course the opposite of what the word literally refers to) + male toxicity + Martin Heidegger + Max Horkheimer + Michel Foucault + Milo F. McDonald + misandry + moral relativism + mRNA ‘vaccines’ peddlers (they are not vaccines but genetic engineering experimentation on a planetary scale and with a Letter of Marqee) + multiculturalism + nazism + obamaphilia + Otto Kirchheimer + post-modernism + reparations + Richard Andrew Cloward + Saul Alinsky +

    Siegfried Kracauer + SJW NPC + social justice + socialists +subjectivism + the Cloward Piven strategy + the Fabian Society + The Long March Through The Institutions + the whole “democratic” party + Theodor W. Adorno + transnazism + Walter Benjamin + white supremacy + woke (wokeism, wokeraty) + zersetzung (the East german Stasi version of ‘cancel culture’ by ANY means necessary) + “social credit score” (a la chicomm) + progressivism + personal pronouns + teach boys not to rape +

    more than two genders + political correctness + The Weather Underground + Bill Ayers + Bernardine Dohrn + pedophilia normalization + Merriam-Webster Dictionary + the weaponization of opponents virtues + the usurped government of Venezuerica

    and that’s not even close to all of it. I’m working on more.

    Add to the above a rabid hatred of everything white, male, heterosexual, decent, normal, human, American and Western and the whims and the fee-feez and the boo-booz and the self-hatred and the inadequacies of its practitioners all of which mixes in a Macbeth witches cauldron and grows like a fungus on a fertile ground, changes all the time adapting to the weaknesses of their victims and grows more evil with every generation and allows us, normals, to paraphrase without a shadow of a doubt: something atrociously wicked this way comes: leftoxenomorphism.

  19. Zaphod – the very one I think of quite often lately.

    If a production of “The Mikado” is set in Twenties Britain is it still cultural appropriation from the Japanese?
    It’s definitely not PC.

    Have you seen the G&S biopic?
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsy-Turvy
    “The story concerns the 15-month period in 1884 and 1885 leading up to the premiere of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. The film focuses on the creative conflict between playwright and composer, and their decision to continue their partnership, which led to their creation of several more Savoy operas.

    The film was not released widely, but it received very favourable reviews, including a number of film festival awards and two Academy Awards for design. While it is considered an artistic success as an in-depth illustration of British life in the theatre during the Victorian era, the film did not recover its production costs.”

    A more traditional production, which is our family’s favorite, from Canada.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbpUzCFCy_8

  20. @AesopFan:

    Nope… Didn’t know about Topsy-Turvy but am going to hunt it down. Thanks!

    One can only imagine the kind of modern PhD thesis this fellow’s life and career would result in:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tannaker_Buhicrosan

    Distantly Related: Back in the day (1970s) BBC or ITV had a series of Late Victorian Music Hall shows — think Champagne Charlie — I must try to find them on YouTube if possible too.

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