Recent events in Canada make more sense now…
Feb 152022
Feb 152022
So CNN decides to cover the recent assassination attempt of a Louisville, Kentucky, mayoral candidate. But… take a look, and see if there are any details that seem lacking in the story:
Louisville mayoral candidate targeted in campaign headquarters shooting, authorities say
Compare that detail-lean story to this one:
BLM, gun-control activist arrested after assassination attempt on Louisville mayoral candidate
Little things missing in the CNN piece include:
Brown is a BLM activist and black nationalist who was praised by former President Barack Obama, MSNBC host Joy Ann Reid, and was a writer for the Courier Journal.
He was a Louisville Youth Voices Against Violence Fellow at the Youth Violence Prevention Research Center, a former intern and editorial columnist for The Courier Journal, and was selected to participate in an Obama Foundation program in which he met the former president.
In 2019, Brown wrote an article saying that an open-carry gun law in Kentucky “shows your life doesn’t matter to gun-loving Republicans.”
“We need a common sense government reform, get rid of assault rifles,” said Brown at the time.
Kinda interesting the things that get memory-holed.
Feb 152022
Feb 152022
Yesterday, someone entered the campaign offices of Louisville, Kentucky, mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg and took several shots at him. The would-be assassin missed, though he came close enough that a bullet grazed the candidates sweater. Greenberg is a Democrat and Louisville is not a small town, so this *should* be Big News. Details are here:
Quintez Brown: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know
Now, here is why this might end up *not* being Big News:
His Twitter profile, @tez4liberation, says, “We have one scientific and correct solution, Pan-Africanism: the total liberation and unification of Africa under scientific socialism ❤️🖤💚.”
Ruh-roh, Raggy…
Amazingly, his Twitter stuff is still available.
Brown is a student at the University of Louisville and is set to graduate in 2022, according to his LinkedIn profile. He graduated from Louisville’s DuPont Manual High School. According to WPFL, he is a, “U of L Woodford R. Porter scholar ━ a designation for Black students who achieve academic excellence and show a commitment to strengthening and serving their communities.”
Whoopsie. Maybe they can get their money back.
Brown said, “As dialectical materialists, we do not believe that life will somehow change in the future, but rather we objectively understand that life is always in a constant state of change, transformation, and flux. Accepting this premise, we move in the present moment to rid ourselves of outdated programs and modalities that lead to our self-destruction and begin to help the masses define their needs, realize their strength, and go into action along a variety of lines which they must choose for themselves.”
He concluded, “My call to action is simple. Voting and petitioning will not be sufficient for our liberation, but in the current moment it will be strategically used to reach the masses. I do not want to speak of a long road ahead of us because no such road exists. We are already here and it begins with you. Secure your number amongst the billion and commit yourself to win a new world side by side with a united left front. ‘From all according to ability.’ Radicalize your natural environment, organize the people around you, and watch our numbers grow.”
Doesn’t exactly sound like one of them skerry Right Wingers, does he. But he does remind me of this:
But by all means, let’s have more Congressional hyperventilating over Little People milling about the Capitol or parents PO’ed about children being terrorized over a pandemic, force fed lunatic political ideologies, plied with perverts and perversion.
Feb 152022
There has been a change to Book 3… Book 3 is now “Volume 1,” and Book 4 (perhaps unsurprisingly, “Volume 2”) has now been contracted for. Woo.
This change was due to the fact that, like the B-47/B-52 book, I got into it and realized that I had way more than initially expected. Book 3 is to be, like SR-71, a “bookazine” which comes with hard page limits. It was a matter of ditching a lot of stuff, compressing a lot of stuff (smaller diagrams, more of ’em per page), or expanding the project. A Volume 3 Is *possible* for somewhere down the line.
Feb 142022
If this was a sane world and this is what it is portrayed as – rather than some TikTokers simply taking the opportunity to gain some clout using books that were being weeded out for normal reasons anyway – these leftist nuts would be:
- Arrested for theft and destruction of property
- Fined and made to pay not only to replace the books they destroyed, but to buy more from the same authors
- Expelled and forbidden from any government scholarships for higher education
High school students throw out dozens of books written by white authors to “decolonize” the school library pic.twitter.com/MqYTrPwQ7D
— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) February 14, 2022
And even if these are books that were being discarded for conventional non-political reasons (note that one of the books has a red “DISCARD” stamp on the cover), what we still have here are lunatics who think that making a show out of destroying history books is a good idea. They are normalizing book burning… if it wasn’t already normalized by these walking, talking, semi-sentient meat puppets. Note that at least one of the “colonizer” authors they gleefully three away was a black feller, an expert on the history of slavery.
Feb 142022
At first…
The claim is made that Henry Sampson invented the cell phone. But then…
Henry Sampson is interviewed and points out that he *didn’t* invent the cell phone. He invented the “gamma electric cell,” which is to gamma rays what a photoelectric cell is to sunlight. That’s certainly not nothing, and is a useful device that is doubtless beyond the ability of the vast majority of people to invent… but despite the fact that it has “cell” in the name, it has nothing to do with cell phones. But the internet is *filled* with sites touting Sampson as the inventor of cell phone technology.
This points out how widely a rather simple misunderstanding can spread to become “truth,” even though the actual facts are *easily* discovered. I don’t doubt that sometime several years ago someone saw “gamma-electric cell” and mistakenly *assumed* a link to cell phones. But at some point an honest mistake based on ignorance becomes a lie, even if those repeating it actually believe it. That point is when the facts are easily available to anyone who wants to find them… but they refuse to do so. This puts it in the same category as the “wage gap,” “pink tax” and Creationism.
Feb 132022
Both the Right and Left Have Illiberal Factions. Which Is More Dangerous?
Starting off, they determine that the audience for “far right” content online is vastly greater than “far left:”
In terms of audience size, Hard Core Right illiberal sites averaged about 186 million visits monthly. That’s about 31 percent the size of the audience for sites representing the mainstream Right and 19 percent the size of the audience of mainstream Left sites. … Unlike the Hard Core Right illiberal sites, the audience for Left illiberal sites is miniscule. Left illiberal sites received a monthly average of about 2.5 million visits.
Which is about 1.3 percent the size of the Hard Core Right illiberal audience.
Let’s just assume for the sake of argument that their data is accurate, *and* that the size of the far right vs. far left can be accurately assessed based on the visits to public and clearly acknowledged extremist websites. Based on that, their judgement is that the far right is something like 76 times bigger/more dangerous than the far left. Their final conclusion:
Those of us who seek to conserve and defend American liberalism should act accordingly, which involves recognizing that the illiberal threat comes overwhelmingly from the right.
The threat comes “overwhelmingly from the right.”
Uh-huh.
Look at the last couple of years. The left can point to one single “riot” by right wingers that largely involved people milling about harmlessly in the halls of power, with a vanishingly small number of knuckleheads busting windows and acting the fool. But on the other hand… the left gave us summers of cities in flames, cops assassinated, Trump supporters ambushed and murdered, cities occupied, books burned, death, destruction, fire and filth.
If there are fifty times more far right types than far left, but the far left actually carries out fifty times more actual violence, doesn’t mean that the lefties are 2,500 times more dangerous per capita? Couple that with this:
No, antifa didn’t ‘infiltrate’ Black Lives Matter during the 2020 protests. But did it increase violence?
The summary *here* is that Antifa showing up is a clear indicator that a protest is going to involve violence, destruction, arrests and injuries… while far right groups showing up statistically does nothing to make a protest more or less violent. It’s almost like people visiting “far right” websites doesn’t actually say anything about whether or not they’re going to be actually violent. I’m reminded of all the moral panics about how Dungeons and Dragons is going to make kids into Satan worshippers, and how video games will make kids into violent psychopaths. Rather than basing the level of threat on what people read, how about basing it on what they *do*?
Plus, their methodology may well not be very good. Do their “far left” websites include Facebook and Twitter? The far right (the *real* far right) has to go to Daily Stormer and such because they’ll get kicked off FB and Twitter and the like. The far left, on the other hand, is welcome there.
Feb 132022
In the past couple years as I’ve been buried under a mountain of CAD drafting, I’ve also found myself with access to a lot of streaming content. So I’ve been watching a lot of old movies that I had never seen before… some good, some bad, a lot indifferent. A week ago I watched “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly;” a few days ago, “Pale Rider.” Those were good. Then yesterday I decided to give “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” a shot. Got less than halfway through it when I decided that, even as background noise, I had far better ways to waste my life.
Let’s get this bit out of the way. As y’all may know, I’m pretty anti-woke. But, *wow,* that trans-racial Mickey Rooney character was freakin’ *painful* to look at and listen to. Yeeeeeesh.
But that wasn’t my problem with the movie. The movie is about one “Holly Golightly,” who turns out to be an incredibly shallow, vapid, materialistic gold digger with no apparent redeeming value. That’s pretty much *exactly* the sort of thing I’m not interested in. And the movie was also *boring.* So somewhere around a third of the movie, a new character was introduced. I looked at him and went “Huh. Is that Buddy Ebsen? It looks like him, but the voice doesn’t sound like him.” So I looked on IMDB, and, yup, that was him. As for the voice, I went to the “trivia” section pf the IMDB page for the movie and tried to find reference to whether Ebsen was dubbed by someone else. I didn’t read that, but I did read this:
Audrey Hepburn said the scene where she throws Cat into the rainy street was the most distasteful thing she ever had to do on film.
Wat.
Quickly losing patience with the film, I looked up “breakfast at tiffany’s” and “cat” and “rain” on YouTube, and found the scene in question. It’s the ending scene of the film, and it shows Holly driving away in a taxi in the rain with her pet cat Cat. She gets in a huff for some reason, stops the taxi, opens the door, and puts the cat out onto the street and has the taxi driver drive away. She doesn’t actually throw the cat, but not only does she dump the cat, she dumps the cat onto a busy street; not only that, onto a busy rainy street. That results in this shot:
The main character of this movie casually discards a cat into the rain.
Nah.
ᚠᚢᚳk ᚣᚩᚢ, ᛒᛁᛏᚳᚻ
So, onto something else with more sympathetic characters.
Feb 132022