The Feral Irishman emails to saw that my post about the climate movie looked weird from his Windows computer. He could watch the movie but there was nothing displayed about Youtube. Everything looked normal from Safari on his iPhone.
Well, it turns out that Youtube has shadowbanned the film. This almost certainly made the post look wonky. If they disappear it I will update the embed to Rumble or something.
You know that you're over the target when you're taking flak.
It's not a real President's birthday (Lincoln's was the 12th, Washington's is the 22nd), but everyone wants a day off, so sorry Abe and George, but we're taking it today. But in the spirit intended for the holiday, let me offer up Borepatch's annual bestest and worstest lists for Presidents.
Top Five:
#5: Calvin Coolidge
Nothing To Report is a fine epitaph for a President, in this day of unbridled expansion of Leviathan.
#4. Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson is perhaps the last (and first) President who exercised extra-Constitutional power in a manner that was unambiguously beneficial for the Republic (the Louisiana Purchase). He repealed Adam's noxious Alien and Sedition Acts and pardoned those convicted under them.
#3. Grover Cleveland.
He didn't like the pomp and circumstance of the office, and he hated the payoffs so common then and now. He continually vetoed pork spending (including for veterans of the War Between the States), so much so that he was defeated for re-election, but unusually won a second term later. This quote is priceless (would that Latter Day Presidents rise so high), on vetoing a farm relief bill: "Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the Government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character."
#2. Ronald Reagan
He at least tried to slow down the growth of Leviathan, the first President to do so in over half a century (see entry #5, above). He would have reduced it further, except that his opposition to the Soviet fascist state and determination to end it cost boatloads of cash. It also caused outrage among the home grown fascists in the Media and Universities, but was wildly popular among the general population which was (and hopefully still remains) sane.
#1. George Washington
Could have been King. Wasn't. Q.E.D.
Bottom Five:
#5. John Adams.
There's no way to read the Alien and Sedition Acts as anything other than a blatant violation of the First Amendment. It's a sad statement that the first violation of a Presidential Oath of Office was with President #2.
#4. Woodrow Wilson.
Not only did he revive the spirit of Adams' Sedition Acts, he caused a Presidential opponent to be imprisoned under the terms of his grotesque Sedition Act of 1918. He was Progressivism incarnate: he lied us into war, he jailed the anti-war opposition, he instituted a draft, and he was entirely soft-headed when it came to foreign policy. The fact that Progressives love him (and hate George W. Bush) says all you need to know about them.
#3 Lyndon Johnson.
An able legislator who was able to get bills passed without having any real idea what they would do once enacted, he is responsible for more Americans living in poverty and despair than any occupant of the White House, and that says a lot.
#2. Franklin Roosevelt.
America's Mussolini - ruling extra-Constitutionally fixing wages and prices, packing the Supreme Court, and transforming the country into a bunch of takers who would sell their votes for a trifle. At least Mussolini met an honorable end.
#1. Abraham Lincoln.
There's no doubt that the Constitution never would have been ratified if the States hadn't thought they could leave if they needed to. Lincoln saw to it that 10% of the military-age male population was killed or wounded preventing that in an extra-Constitutional debacle unequaled in the Republic's history. Along the way, he suspended Habeas Corpus, instituted the first ever draft on these shores, and jailed political opponents as he saw fit. Needless to say, Progressives adore him.
So happy President's Day. Thankfully, the recent occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue haven't gotten this bad. Yet.
The Right Sort of people are losing their minds:
For me, at least, it’s hard to read any of the literature of [the 1920s and 1930s] without getting a potent sense of déjà vu. The same autumnal sense of an era past its pull date, the same spectacle of people and institutions going through motions that stopped functioning a long time ago, the same plaintive voices wondering why the world just doesn’t seem to make sense any more—it’s all present and accounted for, the familiar backdrop for the last few decades of public life in the United States and a good many other industrialized nations. The sole remaining questions are what combination of crises will topple the hapless ruling class from its position, and how soon that inevitable moment will arrive.
Yet admitting that the managerial class has turned out to be incompetent at running societies is unthinkable, to members of that class. It’s not just a matter of status panic, either. The entire collective identity of our managerial aristocracy is founded on the idea that they’re the experts, the smart kids, the people who really know what’s what. They justify their grip on the levels of collective power by insisting that they and they alone can lead the world to a sparkly new future. That’s the theme of the slogans under which they seized power, and it remains the core of their ideology and their identity: “We can make the world better!”
This is John Michael Greer, who used to blog as The Arch Druid. He seems pretty optimistic that the wheels are finally coming off of the Managerial State and that this is probably a good thing:
For the last six years now, accordingly, the failures of the managerial class have become a massive political issue across much of the industrial world. Britain’s Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election both marked important turning points in that process, as significant numbers of ordinary people decided that the experts didn’t know what they were talking about and refused to vote as they were told. The various tantrums thrown by pundits, politicians, and self-anointed influencers since that time haven’t accomplished much, aside from convincing even more people to ignore the increasingly shrill demands of a failing elite.
That’s sending waves of stark shuddering terror through the managerial aristocracy. If the deplorable masses stop bending the knee and tugging their forelocks whenever one of their self-proclaimed betters mouths a platitude, after all, how long will the authority of the managers last? That terror, in turn, gives rise to the displacement activities discussed above. Since it’s impossible for them to admit to themselves that they’ve failed, much less that everyone else is aware that they’ve failed, they find other things on which they can focus their feelings of panic. The Covid virus is one of those. It wasn’t the first and it doubtless won’t be the last, but it’s serving its purpose now, which is to allow members of the managerial class and its hangers-on in the media and the academy to distract themselves from the end of their era of power.
Peter thinks that they are trying to crash the airplane into a mountain - create enough starvation and impoverishment that a desperate population turns to them to fix the crisis they created. I could see them try this; I don't think that the reaction will be what they think it will be.
The problem is that the only people who will trust them to "fix" their problem are the ones who already trust them. That is a continually shrinking portion of the public despite the increasingly shrill social shaming that they are doing. They are not convincing anyone and indeed are doing the opposite:
My liberal friends (and yes, I do have a few still, though most tossed me under the bus as soon as there was any societal pressure to do so) will constantly chide me about my words, or my attitude, and go tsk tsk, how rude! But then when people on their side go bat shit fucking insane, they sit there meekly and stand for nothing, because they know the beast they fed will just as easily turn and eat them too.
Besides, as soon as a democrat stands for principle outside of the narrative, they get tossed. Pick any of them in media, punditry, or academia. Any at all. Glenn Greenwald. Tim Pool. Jordan Peterson. Those were all mushy moderates, until they say hey wait, the left is going nuts, and boom, now the left thinks they are the second coming of Satan-Hitler. The party is currently enraged at Sinema and Manchin.
And I’m not alone in this. Most politically alert non-leftists will tell you the same thing. You belong to a cult which will not abide heresy. You want to show us that you aren’t all authoritarian statist trash, DO SOMETHING.
J.Kb has an outstanding example of their closed - and clueless - world view. This is the Elite that will solve the Republic's problems? As John Michael Greer points out, Tomorrowland has fallen.
This so-called "elite" knows nothing of history. Basically every revolution in history was started by a starving underclass. While I think that Peter is right that they could very well pitch this country into that sinkhole, they do not seem to realize that each of these revolutions was against the Powers That Be who were running things. Just how they will harness all this underclass rage against The Man when they're him is beyond me.
They're desperate, and they're out of gas, and it sure doesn't look like their scheme to start revolution in the streets can do anything other than build their own funeral pyre, the Sardanapalus option:
“The Death of Sardanapalus” by Eugène Delacroix depicts the tale of Sardanapalus, a king of Assyria, who, according to an ancient story, exceeded all previous rulers in sloth and decadence.
He spent his whole life in self-indulgence, and when he wrote his epitaph, he stated that physical gratification is the only purpose of life.
His debauchery caused dissatisfaction within the Assyrian empire, allowing conspiracies against him to develop. Sardanapalus failed to defeat the rebels, and then enemies of the empire join the battle against him.
After Sardanapalus’ last defenses collapsed and to avoid falling into the hands of his enemies, Sardanapalus ordered an enormous funeral pyre.
On the funeral pyre were piled all his gold and valuables. He also ordered that his eunuchs and concubines be added to the fire, to burn them and himself to death.
Nobody did romantic doomed fate better than Byron and Delacroix. Alas, I feat that Hollywood will not be up to this level of artistic achievement for what the "elites" are bringing down on their own heads.
This quote (and the post it is from) makes no mention of the pilots, and was written from the point of view of the working man. But it explains clearly what is going on (you'll have to read the whole thing to see how this applies to pilots as well):
I think that in retrospect, the decision to lock down entire societies to stop the coronavirus will end up in the history books as one of the most spectacular blunders ever committed by a ruling class. Partly, of course, the lockdowns didn’t work—look at graphs of case numbers over time from places that locked down vs. places that didn’t, and you’ll find that locking down societies and putting millions of people out of work didn’t do a thing to change the size and duration of the outbreak. Partly, the economic damage inflicted by the lockdowns would have taken years to heal even if the global industrial economy wasn’t already choking on excessive debt and running short of a galaxy of crucial raw materials. But there’s more to it than that.
If you want people to put up patiently with long hours of drudgery at miserably low wages, subject to wretched conditions and humiliating policies, so that their self-proclaimed betters can enjoy lifestyles they will never be able to share, it’s a really bad idea to make them stop work and give them a good long period of solitude, in which they can think about what they want out of life and how little of it they’re getting from the role you want them to play. It’s an especially bad idea to do it so that they have no way of knowing when, or if, they will ever be allowed to return to their former lives, thus forcing them to look for other options in order to stay fed, clothed, housed, and the like.
This post by Adam Piggott is simply unimprovable. RTWT, but this is a taste:
And really, they’re just profiting off modern man’s shallow desire to live just one more day no matter what the cost. That’s why they’re trying to jab 12 year olds with this toxic crap so the old fucks can live just one more day, it’s all I’ve got, hey, did you see my boat and my Porsche and the ski lodge?
Everything they have told you is a lie. Don’t take their pills, don’t take their jabs, don’t follow their dietary recommendations, don’t do their exercise routines, don’t take 0.7 glasses of wine per day while you have your 1.2 kids, don’t listen to their music recommendations, or their reading material, or watch their evil films, don’t do any of it. Don’t be a boring shitless bastard that does just what he’s told and then has the sheer stupidity to try and lecture those of us who haven’t fallen for the crap and are trying with some very small success to wake you all the fuck up.
Awesome.
You look at the destructive policies that are being put in place and wonder what on earth the left is up to. Places that have the most "progressive" governments are instituting profoundly anti-progressive policies, like eliminating advanced math courses in public schools, or eliminating charter schools. Both of these benefit middle class or working class students - the elites, of course, send their kids to private schools. You could as easily use the example of unions losing good paying jobs when pipelines and oil drilling permits are canceled.
So what gives? I mean, it's obvious that these policies are destructive to income equality. J.Kb has a very interesting angle on what is driving the insanity:
The elites love, above all else, having things and access to things that regular people don’t ...
The point of buying shit like that is the knowledge that people who didn’t go to the right finishing schools and then to Harvard and then do a brokerage firm on Wall Street can’t buy that stuff.
Moreover, what the elite hate more than anything else is that so much of what they had we can have too.
...
Cellphones and laptops used to be status symbols of the elite. Think about Gordon Gekko in Wall Street talking on his cellphone in 1987. By 1997, every middle-class businessman in Miami had a cellphone. By 2007, cellphones were so ubiquitous that high school kids had cell phones, new homebuyers had given up landlines, and payphones were removed from public places.
Technology had democratized luxury and the elite couldn’t stand it.
Since then, the desire has been not just to own more but to make the rest of us own less ...
That doesn’t apply to the elite, just to us.
Now add Kurt Schlicter's insight about anti-Trumpism:
The real reason the elite hated Donald Trump was not that he was an ideological conservative (he only sort of was) or that he tweeted mean things (they like mean tweets, just not ones directed at them). It was that Trump identified the failures of “the best and the brightest” and called them out. There is nothing these experts hate more than challenges to the authority they think they deserve.
He drew back the curtain so that everyone could see that the "elites" were anything but elite. They cannot ever forgive him for that, and thus the rage.
Putting these together, we can see that the elites are furious at the idea that someone could challenge their authority, and determined that this will never happen again. This is why these anti-progressive policies are being implemented everywhere: it's to tell the "non-elites" that they need to keep their place, or else. Every Trump voter will be punished, to make sure a Trumpist rebellion never occurs again. The punishments will be crude, and the cruder the better - to drive home the point of who's on top and who isn't (and won't ever be).
Back in November, I posted about the surprising crudeness of the election fraud:
What is striking about the fraud is the blatant clumsiness on display: the Democrats aren't even trying to hide the fact that they are manufacturing ballots in industrial quantities. This is really, really interesting, and suggests that their motive is not simply to install their preferred candidate in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It suggests that the motivation is deeper, and darker.
Theodore Dalrymple studied Soviet era propaganda - the propaganda targeting not a western audience, but instead the populations of the Warsaw Pact. He was struck by how crude it was:
In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.
I think that this is what they're after - showing the country that they can steal an election and there's nothing that we can do about it. It comes from the same source that causes cities to remove statues of George Washington. It's showing who's up and who's down.
The crudeness of it all isn't a bug - it's the primary point to these people, who believe that they have a fundamental right to rule.
The elites are determined that their opponents will be humiliated and impoverished forever. Never again will they be laughed at by the unwashed masses. Never again will the masses aspire to the elite's station. The elites don't mind the masses hating them so long as they fear them.
That's why there will never be a free and fair election in the country again, at least if the elites get their way.
Why did the Deutsche Bank give up their beloved Deutsche Mark and join the Eurozone? It was good business for Germany:
A 2019 German think tank report, entitled ‘20 Years of the Euro; Winners and Losers’, costed the single currency’s impact on individual states. From 1999 to 2017, only Germany and the Netherlands were serious winners with the former gaining a huge € 1.9 trillion, or around €23,000 per inhabitant. In all other states analysed the Euro has provoked a drop in prosperity, with France losing a massive €3.6 trillion and Italy €4.3 trillion. French losses amount to €56,000 per capita and for Italians €74,000.
Those are big numbers. You could do the same analysis here looking at Rust Belt vs. Coastal enclaves and I suspect you would see the same sort of thing. The proof point for that is how working class incomes rose under the Trump administration for the first time in decades. No doubt the Biden administration will get to work on that.
I really struggle to understand how The Powers That Be in both Brussels and Washington don't see the revolutionary implications in this. Didn't they read Marx?
Hat tip: Samizdata.
What is striking about the fraud is the blatant clumsiness on display: the Democrats aren't even trying to hide the fact that they are manufacturing ballots in industrial quantities. This is really, really interesting, and suggests that their motive is not simply to install their preferred candidate in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It suggests that the motivation is deeper, and darker.
Theodore Dalrymple studied Soviet era propaganda - the propaganda targeting not a western audience, but instead the populations of the Warsaw Pact. He was struck by how crude it was:
In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.
I think that this is what they're after - showing the country that they can steal an election and there's nothing that we can do about it. It comes from the same source that causes cities to remove statues of George Washington. It's showing who's up and who's down.
The crudeness of it all isn't a bug - it's the primary point to these people, who believe that they have a fundamental right to rule.
The Boxer at Rest is a bronze Hellenistic sculpture dating from somewhere between 330 - 50 B.C. Rather than showing a heroic figure, it shows a battered boxer. His nose is broken, his lip is split and he has cauliflower ears as well as numerous cuts. The statue also has copper inlaid to represent splattered blood.
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| Alberto Giacometti, Cat |
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| Henry Moore, Double Oval |
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| David Smith, CUBI VI |
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| The Golden Madonna, ca. 980 AD |
As I was reading all the righteous smackdown aimed his way, something was tickling my memory cells. Hadn't I posted about Nichols, Back In The Day? Why yes, I had:The “experts” do not have expertise based on an analysis of the empirical evidence. They have their prejudices reinforced from inside their elite echo chambers.The public has come to realize that and doesn’t want to listen to these idiots and assholes anymore.Case in point, his opinion on CCW:Even when I was a Republican, I never understood people who measure freedom by how many of us walk around with guns. This is a cultural change, the spreading of the gun culture from a corner of the GOP to the entire conservative moment. /1The spread of gun worship is conservative virtue-signaling. Never liked it when I was among my old tribe, and it’s gotten worse as “conservatives” try to figure out new markers for what makes them “patriots” now that they’ve had to sell out so much actual patriotism to Trump.
I could go on, but by now you've noticed the Learned Expert's habit of setting up straw men. No, anger at the NSA's spying program isn't founded in a feeling that it's unconstitutional and damaging to America's economy and security, it's because we disrespect Mr. Schindler's advanced education. No, we do not question Expert Foreign Policy opinions on Russia because of spectacular failures of past Russian Policy Experts (c.f. the CIA's assessment that the USSR was the world's 3rd largest economy in 1988), it's because we don't appreciate his PhD. No, we don't question the research from the current Academic Establishment because it has produced oddball policy recommendations regarding Global Warming and Keynesian Economics - it's because we don't even understand what a PhD means.I guess we can add "paying gigs moonlighting for The Atlantic" to that list. Oh, and the post title? "Elitist bemoans declining popularity of elitism". That was six years ago.
Oooooh kaaaaaay.
My take is that Tom Nichols is a very smart guy who needs to get out more often. In particular, he needs to hear more people voicing (legitimate) complaints about the Elite's lack of transparency, accountability, and propensity to game the system in pursuit of tenure and grant funding.
Against legitimacy is arrayed usurpation; against modest, single-minded, righteous, and brave resistance to encroachment is arrayed boastful, double-tongued, selfish, and treacherous ambition to possess. God defend the right!The global elites have been searching for an alternative to representative democracy as a source of legitimacy for two decades. They haven't come up with a viable alternative. Sure, the EU was successful in their keep voting on EU referendums until you vote the right way but that was only on the continent, and while it gave the EU political power it didn't give it political legitimacy. Not legitimacy in the sense that we've come to think of it over the course of the 19th and 20th Centuries.― Charlotte Brontë
To put on the garment of legitimacy is the first aim of every coup.- Barbara Tuchman
But hey, TrailerParkTrashMart, thanks for opening the market up for every other brick-and-mortar firearms retailer in the country, and eliminating your loss-leader negotiating position to sell firearms below cost just to drive littler guys out of business. Firearms makers can now tell you to kiss their ass when you want their product cheaper year-over-year. That just ended too, whether you figured it out or not. Sam is probably spinning in his grave, and his half-wit kinfolk heirs clearly haven't the wits to run a roadside chicken stand. If he were alive, he'd kick their asses, then disown them all.
...
I'll still visit your stores though.The whole thing is as good. The Raconteur Report: purveyors of quality rants since 2008 ...
Just to use the bathroom.
80-20 my turds land in the middle of the floor though, or in the sink bowl, every time.
Have fun with that. I sure will.
Be a real shame if something that simple caught on nationwide.
Remember, guys, the enemy always gets a vote. ;)
And I'll be eating a lot more ethnic foods, and voting often.
Got a hankerin' for some Panda Express broccoli beef today...
"Cleanup on Aisle 2..."
Just Imagine being squad leader giving orders to a Woman Solider on the deadly frontlines of WWII and she hits you back with the “StOp MaNsPlAiNinG”Not even a little bit respectful, right there, but funny as hell. Maybe the kids are all right after all. Man, if the comments are any indication, Electronic Arts has some very poor sales ahead of itself here.
Are you going to become ideologues or SJW's, forcing your politics into everybody's fun? And if you choose the later then realize that not only are you tyrants, but you're also dicks because there's no more of a dick move than ruining other people's fun.Yup.
President Trump, vulgar?!? You mean he puts ketchup on his steak and builds GOLDEN TOWERS with his name on them?!? How very vulgar, can't vote for him; so much better to have one of our inside-the-beltway, political class elites run the country.There's more, and it's just as insightful. RTWT.
You know, the same crew who've been country club asset-stripping the country for a couple of decades.
And now for extra credit, ponder what is the likely response if the Elites win the current culture battle. How will those being replaced react? How likely will it be that someone else will tap into the (ever increasing) rage of the dispossessed? How likely is it that the Elites will be even more horrified at this new someone else?They think we’ve betrayed and abandoned them for a mess of virtue signaling and glib ideologizing. On the left: identity politics, PC, and open borders justified on multiculturalist grounds. On the right: free trade and open borders justified on laissez-faire principle.I’d claim that one of the things that is causing resentment isn’t even the immigrants as such: It is the fact that they are being EXPLICITLY used as replacements for the low-status (and not so low-status in the case of software engineers) natives. This is happening both in terms of work (train your replacement and die in a ghetto), and in terms of voting (illegal if you’re not yet a full citizen, but being quite deliberately tolerated and encouraged with a smirk.)So, no, we don’t think you’re betraying us for virtue signaling. You’re betraying us because we’re expensive, we’re not pliable and dependent serfs, and we’re not voting to keep you in power. The virtue signaling is one part leftist mental tic and one part rationalization. You want to disposes us. You scream it from the podium that you want to take what we have, and that immigrants are your instrument, and that you were almost demographically there if it weren’t for those meddling populists. Err .. I mean “Russians”. Yeah…Given that, how could Trump (or worse) NOT happen?
Having read DuckDuckGo's privacy statements, you might decide to switch Safari's default search to DuckDuckGo. If we enter a new search in Safari, we can then search the logged data to see who the search terms are actually sent to.It would be interesting to see what breaks if you put network Access Control Lists to block access to *.apple.com. I'd think that it might effectively brick your laptop.
The logs show that a copy of your Safari searches are still sent to Apple, even when selecting DuckDuckGo as your search provider, and 'Spotlight Suggestions' are disabled in System Preferences > Spotlight.
The review, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), shows that while Americans view scientists as competent, they are not entirely trusted. This may be because they are not perceived to be friendly or warm.Gosh, I keep seeing these things that reinforce my faith in the basic wisdom of the American People. But what do the researchers say is the solution?
In particular, Americans seem wary of researchers seeking grant funding and do not trust scientists pushing persuasive agendas. Instead, the public leans toward impartiality.
"Scientists have earned the respect of Americans but not necessarily their trust," said lead author Susan Fiske, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and professor of public affairs. "But this gap can be filled by showing concern for humanity and the environment. Rather than persuading, scientists may better serve citizens by discussing, teaching and sharing information to convey trustworthy intentions."So a Psychologist and Public Affairs Professor says that the way to address mistrust caused by the perception of agenda-driven science and featherbedding is by pushing an environmentalist agenda and slick talking. Riiiight. Good idea.
Well, I don't know about the "work from home" part, and whether you need to stuff envelopes, but the money's sweet: $79B since 1989, just from the US Fed.Gov. Add in the fellow traveler Euro.Govs and you've maybe doubled that.Or perhaps it's an awareness that scientists are not playing straight with the public?
Note that's "B" as in "Billion". Skim a lot off the top for Department of Energy and other bureaucrats, and there's plenty of cold hard cash, as long as you toe the line
