Home » Open thread 7/6/21

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Open thread 7/6/21 — 39 Comments

  1. I just blew 15 minutes watching ozzie vids. It’s addictive! Best is still otter v. orca, previously posted.

  2. Applying the same principles to both sides … I was just wondering about this case last week. Now there’s an update.

    Despite the extremely violent nature of the attack in which Rahman reportedly tossed a Molotov cocktail into the console of a police cruiser before hopping into a getaway car driven by Mattis, and the fact that the pair of left-wing attorneys were found to be producing and distributing Molotov cocktails to Black Lives Matter and Antifa-aligned radicals, federal prosecutors have been working hard to hammer out a plea deal for the pair of violent offenders.

    According to the New York Post, both parties remain locked in negotiations with federal prosecutors and a federal judge has granted the pair a number of opportunities to work something out with the prosecution before having to face trial like a mere ordinary citizen. Both Mattis and Rahman remain out of jail, standing in stark contrast to the treatment received by January 6th Capitol Hill demonstrators who have reported facing Gulag-style conditions and severe physical abuse while awaiting trial in a Washington, D.C. jail on nonviolent charges.

    While the pair of violent, far left-wing attorneys are still permitted to practice law in New York, Trump attorney and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is not, having seen his law license suspended without any form of due process by the New York State Bar Association for daring to question the Democrat-media complex narrative surrounding the 2020 Presidential Election.

    https://nationalfile.com/judges-say-far-left-attorneys-who-firebombed-cops-for-blm-can-still-practice-law-in-new-york-rudy-giuliani-cannot/

  3. This morning I gritted my teeth and listened to an NPR “News” 5-minute long piece about the “wave of violent crime” (their words) surging through the country. There were only two messages, repeated over and over by various spokespeople:
    1. Joe Biden has always had a good relationship with the police, and…
    2. This sure is politically inconvenient for Biden and the Democrats!

    There was not a single mention of any impact on the average American!

    To me this demonstrates that NPR is utterly committed to the welfare of the Democrat Party alone, and cannot be relied upon for any objective information. They need to be de-funded and shut down. It is a crime that the American people are forced to support such a nest of vipers!

  4. OregonMuse at Ace of Spades starts to catch on.

    Years ago I heard the saying “Politics is show business for ugly people”. It’s just “show business” now. Trump caught on to the show business part, but wasn’t able to handle what the show business is covering for.


    Kayfabe is a term used to describe the illusion that professional wrestling is not staged.

    Outside of kayfabe, champions are won by a wrestler who the bookers believe will generate fan interest.

    For a long time I have been looking for a word that would adequately describe this weird sense of unreality I have been feeling for the past several years. Like I am now living in clown world and everything I’m seeing, particularly from Washington DC, is being staged. The problem is, there’s no way I can pelt the performers with rotting vegetables and eggs, like I could do at a bad play if I lived in the old days.

  5. FWIW: Anyone considering forming a neighbourhood mutual aid society could do well to communicate using WeChat while there still is an Internet. You’re better off having your chat metadata and contents logged and processed by an AI in a datacentre in Lanzhou than in your local friendly TLA big bro’s data centre in Utah. Just saying.

  6. @om:

    How do you say Can Do in Yiddish?

    https://forward.com/schmooze/159051/a-jew-in-maos-china/

    “Even when I have been disenfranchised from God and synagogue, I have always been culturally proud to be a Jew. A source of that pride is the Jewish tradition of helping the oppressed, and our involvement in social movements such as labor and civil rights.

    Until I saw the documentary “The Revolutionary” at the Philadelphia Independent Film Festival, I mistakenly thought that China during the revolutionary period was one country that had not felt the Jewish embrace. In fact, 85 to 90% of the foreigners helping the Chinese at the time of the Communist takeover were Jewish. This included the daughter of the founder of the brokerage firm Goldman Sachs, who left the comfort of her Park Avenue home to assist the Chinese.”

    Documentary is about Sydney Rittenberg. Good news is that Mao lockee him up loooong time for all his troubles anyway 🙂

    He died in the USA in 2019, two years too early to burn his WeChat.

  7. Apropos of nothing in particular, but bearing in mind Neo’s recent references to Hollywood movies, I’d like to suggest one of my own.

    Yes, it’s on YouTube unfortunately. But since the competitors are busy with promoting pet videos …

    The movie is an old 1950’s film called Boy on a Dolphin. Of those who have heard of it, most have probably heard of it in connection with Alan Ladd’s late career performance and his height issues vis-a-vis Loren. They seem to me vastly overstated now that I have seen the film.

    I recommend it here simply because of what must be in a couple of instances, some of the most spectacular Technicolor scenery footage from a film of that era.

    And no, I am not referring to the shots of Sophia Loren emerging drenched from the sea with a bag of sponges she has hunted up. Though there, uh, is that …

    I am referring to film images of Greece as I have never seen them presented before.

    And even those of us who have never been to Greece have seen countless hours of footage taken of the Greek countryside in documentaries, travelogues, and in numerous other movies.

    But this cinematography … for that era … I am impressed.

    https://youtu.be/0nCwoRkIxP4?t=2011

    There are several versions posted. In this one the sound cuts out and and begins again as the first scene commences. I cannot vouch for the print quality of the others. This, at about a gigabyte, is hi-def enough to watch on a 50 inch flat screen and the colors, which are the focus of my comment largely, are preserved.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nCwoRkIxP4

    Take 5 minutes and look.

  8. @DNW:

    Can’t beat real film. Shooting it was so insanely expensive that they really had to know their craft back then.

    I just googled 4K Greek Islands and there’s oodles of digital material out there… but who wants to watch hours of picture perfect HDR drone footage at 60fps? — it’s a bit Uncanny Valley.

  9. Funny but true quote:

    Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, Pakistani Military intelligence, the ISI, accurately foresaw what is now happening in Afghanistan as I post this:

    “when Afghanistan’s history came to be written, it would record that the ISI, with the help of America, defeated the Soviet Union. And next, historians would record that the ISI, with the help of America, defeated America.”

    Source:

    https://blog.reaction.la/war/the-isi-with-the-help-of-america-defeated-america/

  10. Some here might be interested in this intellectual biography of Michael Rectenwald, author, and NYU professor from 2008-2019. I linked two essays of his citing John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty here recently, which you can find by clicking on his name.

    How a Marxist of Twenty-Five Years Became a Misesian Libertarian
    https://mises.org/wire/how-marxist-twenty-five-years-became-misesian-libertarian

    In the fall of 2016, I was a left communist. …

    From Marx to Mises
    [near the end]

    By the end of 2016, I no longer identified as a communist and soon renounced the Left entirely. I’d tried on almost every kind of Marxism, including Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, and even left communism, and not one of them fit me. As it turned out, something within me incessantly rebelled against the dogmatism. It infringed my sense of intellectual independence.

    I came to see the inherent totalitarianism of Marxism. I soon realized that there was no way to establish socialism-communism without force. I recognized, contrary to Marx’s animadversions to the contrary, that all socialism is utopian, and that utopianism is just totalitarianism in waiting. There is no way to establish some people’s idea of utopia without squelching if not obliterating other people’s rights. …

  11. https://vdare.com/articles/patrick-j-buchanan-as-america-recedes-china-rises

    “China’s emergence over the past four decades ranks as the biggest and longest-run economic boom in history. Its annual gross domestic product rose from a mere $191bn, or $195 per capita, in 1980 to $14.3tn, or $10,261 per capita, in 2019. It has raised more than 770m people from poverty and transformed the Chinese economy into a high-tech powerhouse that is on course to eclipse America’s in size. This transformation is the landmark achievement of the Chinese Communist party, which celebrates its 100th anniversary on Thursday.”

    China’s growth could not have been achieved had it not been for the U.S. decision to throw open the world’s largest consumer market to Chinese-made goods, to bring Beijing into the World Trade Organization, and to sit idly by as a huge slice of U.S. industry and manufacturing was transshipped to China for production there and not here.

    Between 1990 and 2021, U.S. imports of Chinese-made goods provided Beijing with the trillions it has accumulated to finance its strategic objective of becoming the first power on earth.

    But this is water over the dam. Where do we go from here?

    … Confucius Say: Yankee Go Home and Tidy Your Room ™.

    Gives me no pleasure to say it. The coming collapse or retreat of empire (pick one) will be to the serious detriment of the odd billion or so non-Americans who lived under the Old Pax. But there you are.

  12. @HumphreyP:

    Abridged Version:

    Marxist Reality Denier becomes Even More Esoteric Libertarian Sperged Out Reality Denier. USA barrels onward toward perdition.

    🙂

    Does he have a Libertarian Model for dealing with demographic replacement or even something trivial like fixing up Jackson Mississippi?

    Once Libertarianism has solved those problems perhaps could take a look at how to handle a rapacious mercantilist peer level competitor with nuclear weapons and inscrutably vindictive slanty panda eyes.

    I just don’t get what is the use of Libertarianism. I can see the point of Austrian Economics because it holds up a mirror to the present carnival of thieves masquerading as a financial system… but nothing in either seems to show a way out of the present predicament.

  13. @HumphreyP:

    Nope. He’s smarter and writes far better and more to the point than I do.

    If you listen to his podcasts, he has a clown car horn honking SFX every time he mentions Libertarianism. Possibly not to your taste :).

  14. Good. The economics article I recall contained many falsehoods and displayed a great deal of ignorance on the subject.

  15. @HumphreyP:

    Talking of Marxists and reality denial, I’ve just finished reading “Molotov Remembers” — notes on conversations with him between ca. 1966 – his death in 1986 — by Feliks Chuev.

    By the time got to the end, almost felt a bit sorry for the old killer living widowed in his dacha. At least he didn’t live to see what became of it all. Lazar Kaganovich made it to mid-1991.

  16. Was just trying to google up more info on Feliks Chuev and found this instead. Article includes some quotes from Chuev’s book.

    Always topical hehe:

    https://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Was-the-Russian-Revolution-Jewish-514323

    “How can we explain their disproportionate presence in the leadership of the revolution? It would be as if the Druse minority in Israel made up half of Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, or Armenians were half of Emmanuel Macron’s government in France.”

    And yes… you can all be sure I picked the most fair and balanced quote 😛

  17. @HumphreyP:

    Feel free to set him straight then. Can’t have Pied Pipers promoting wrong ideas about economics. Demolish him him on Gab where he posts and fame is yours. Plus think of all the minds you might change.

  18. Zaphod:

    No thanks. It was start to finish. He is not very well read. It is way too much work on my part.

  19. Can Do! continues to praise his Han masters. That social credit score has him worried.

    Citing Patrick Buchannon, really? LOL, babblebox takes the smoke to 11.

  20. What’s wrong Can Do? The Cloth Headed Dummy forgot that he is only to bow down before Xi (aka Winnie the Poo)?

  21. Thanks DNW. I was not aware of that one. I can tell you living on an island in the Aegean is much preferable to watching uTube. Another advantage is not having to put up with Hannah-Jones types, although the girl who works at the local Taberna told me she was admonished by a black Hannah-Jones wannabe for wearing her hair in braids. Can you imagine? Not safe from this virus anywhere.

  22. “although the girl who works at the local Taberna told me she was admonished by a black Hannah-Jones wannabe for wearing her hair in braids.”

    Everybody knows that Braids were invented by @*^^$#s When They Was Kangs in Egypt.

    If you’re going to be a Kang, at least be a Useful Kang:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_bed-stove

    Not quite the Hypocaust, but then China never collapsed into a total Dark Age and lost all its goodies.

  23. Zaphod, you crack me up 🙂 Come on over to Paros and have a glass (or two) of retsina! Everyone…try to have a great summer.

  24. Zaphod, don’t forget that Cleopatra, queen of Egypt at the time of Caesar descended from the Greek Ptolemy family. Had she still been alive, she would have smacked that silly girl down good and hard!

    Thanks for the link to Kang. There is a picture of Harry A Franck sitting on a Kang. I read most of Franck’s travel books and copied several of his routes in my younger days….nice memories.

  25. @Xylourgos:

    I’ve got a soft spot for Ptolemy I Soter… Wise Old File who knew how to bide his time. Trying to remember who wrote the good novel I once read about his maneuverings — I think it was Funeral Games by Mary Renault (whom you may well have read more of given where you live).

    As for me, I’m a Paddy Fermor Fan so am a trifle disappointed you don’t live in the Mani. But fear not will come raise a resinous glass with you in the Islands one of these days!

    Had never heard of Harry Franck but quick google shows that he was the kind of vagabond author I really enjoy. Many thanks for the tip.

  26. Zaphod, me too, I’m a big Fermor fan. I love the way he captured Kreipe. What nerve! The Maniots are a special breed of crazy although the original Parosians are not too far behind. The nearby island of Delos was a major slave trading center with, at one point 1000’s of slaves passing hands in a day. The locals still retain some of their piratical ways – especially in regards with the wives of their friends!.

  27. “I just don’t get what is the use of Libertarianism. “

    Libertarianism is not so much a coherent philosophy as a way of dealing with smallish numbers self-destructive people who are content to slit their own wrists, or do their consensual buggery out in the woods somewhere.

    It is better than dedicating your life to policing their behaviors.

    But of course the right to run full speed into a brick wall with the forbearance of your nominal peers, is definitely not what the affirmation whores whose life only becomes real to them when others a sucked into their dramas. are content with.

    They cannot make God or Nature suffer for what He has done to them, so they will hang their living-dead albatross carcasses around your neck or else. Meaning the only selection you get is the eventual choice of submitting to, or killing them.

  28. Xylourgos on July 7, 2021 at 1:24 am said:

    Thanks DNW. I was not aware of that one. I can tell you living on an island in the Aegean is much preferable to watching uTube.

    And I can tell you that I believe you.

    Yet, I’m always impressed with a director or a cinematographer who is not content to shoot everything in the noonday sun, and then add a couple of stock footage sunsets to dress it up a bit. Unwatchable usually.

    As bad as trying to watch those formula “Westerns”, or those cheapie budget films – WWII and others – shot on the Hollywood Hills studio ranches at 2:30 PM on a July afternoon. Be it supposedly Colorado in 1848, or Planet Zebulon 5, or the German-French frontline fall of 1944 … it all looks the same: dusty hills, scrub vegetation, and in the case of WWII portrayals, 43 year old actors wearing helmet liners and pretending to be ….

    So … even if they were using filters for The Boy on a Dolphin, and admitting that it was Technicolor after all, it still looked impressive.

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