I’m with this lady: “He can fix my car anytime.”
Roundup
(1) RIP Willie Mays at 93. I confess that I was previously unaware that he was still alive.
(2) Victor Davis Hanson writes:
… [The left] is in full panic that its unconstitutional efforts to destroy Trump will obviously be used against itself—given it knows that if it returned to power it would go after its enemies in precisely the same, any-means-necessary ways that it had sought to destroy Trump. That is, they have destroyed norms and have established dangerous new precedents that they just assume, given their Jacobin nature, must rebound against themselves.
(3) The Connecticut Bar Association warns its members not to point out the obvious about the NY kangaroo court that convicted Trump:
On the afternoon of Thursday, June 16th, the Connecticut Bar Association (CBA) sent an email to all of its membership, signed by the CBA President, Vice-President, and President-elect. The email, available here, warns all members of the CBA that they better not say, anywhere, in any form or forum, that Donald Trump’s trial, which, as you know, resulted in him being convicted of 34 felonies, was a “‘sham,’ a ‘hoax,’ [or] ‘rigged,’”, or that “our justice system is ‘corrupt and rigged,’” or that “the judge was ‘corrupt’ [or] ‘highly unethical.’” The email also stated that CBA members need to speak up in support of the Trump verdict because “[t]o remain silent renders us complicit in that effort,” i.e. the “effort” to damage the judiciary.
Wow.
(4) In response to #3 above, Jonathan Turley writes:
My concern is not with the plea for lawyers to take care that their comments do not encourage such “aggressive tactics.” The problem is the suggestion that lawyers are acting somehow unprofessionally in denouncing what many view as a two-tier system of justice and the politicalization of our legal system.
Like many, I believe that the Manhattan case was a flagrant example of such weaponization of the legal system and should be denounced by all lawyers. It is a return, in my view, to the type of political prosecution once common in this country.
For those lawyers who view such prosecutions as political, they are speaking out in defense of what they believe is the essence of blind justice in America. What is “reckless” to the Connecticut Bar is righteous to others. Notably, the Bar officials did not write to denounce attacks on figures like Bill Barr or claims that the Justice Department was rigging justice during the Trump years.
Of course they didn’t. Those were good attacks from the left on the right.
(5) Climate activists vandalize Stonehenge. They remind me a bit of the Taliban.
(6) Netanyahu says that the Biden administration actually has been withholding weapons from Israel in recent months.
Reporting on the Gaza famine that never was: why does the MSM spread the lies?
[Hat tip: commenter “Barry Meislin.”]
The UN says Whoopsies, probably no famine in Gaza. This of course is after many many months of worldwide reporting on the supposed famine, and plenty of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish demonstrations as a result. Here’s the latest from the august body, the UN:
A UN committee of experts said in a recently released report that there is “no supporting evidence” to conclude that there is a famine in Gaza.
The 18-page report, released by the United Nations Famine Review Committee on June 4, contradicted an analysis by the US-based Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET)**, which reported in May that northern Gaza was “possibly” already amid famine conditions that would continue to the end of July.
The UN committee’s report said it “does not find the FEWS NET analysis plausible given the uncertainty and lack of convergence of the supporting evidence employed in the analysis. Therefore, the FRC is unable to make a determination as to whether or not famine thresholds have been passed during April.” The UN cited data gaps and questioned FEWS NET’s reliance on “multiple layers of assumptions and inference.”
According to the UN report, “While the use of assumptions and inference is standard practice in [classifying whether a region meets famine thresholds] generally, the limitations of the available body of evidence and the extent of its convergence for northern Gaza in April leads to a very high level of uncertainty regarding the current food security and nutritional status of the population.”
In other words, there’s no evidence that there’s a famine, but since Israel is always guilty till proven otherwise (and often even when proven otherwise), we’ll hedge and say we just don’t have a clue but we can’t disprove it either.
This is the pattern with the UN. Sometimes they actually ultimately clear Israel’s name a bit, but only after the lies have gone not just halfway round the world but around the world many times over and become suitably entrenched in people’s minds. Then on to the next lie, and the next.
I first noticed this pattern with the fake massacre in Jenin in 2002 (see this for my post about it). It was quite instrumental in my political change and my realization of the many lies I had swallowed previously at the hands of the press. So it’s very easy to recognize the same pattern continuing ever since; it has definitely been present post-10/7 whenever the MSM and the left covers and describes Israel’s actions and the extent of Gazan suffering.
I firmly believe that most of those doing the initial reporting on deaths, atrocities, famines, and the like are not fooled by the initial reports coming from Hamas and Gaza and realize there are compelling reasons to doubt them. With the lengthy history of lying from those sources, they should be considered extremely suspicious at this point. I cannot help but conclude that people in the west report them as truth anyway because they want to do so.
And why would they want to support lies in order to harm Israel and increase sympathy for the Gazans and Hamas? Mix and match from the following:
(1) Anti-Semitism.
(2) Virtue-signaling and conformity – one must do this to be in with the current in-crowd.
(3) A subset of #2: proving one isn’t racist, since the Israelis are arbitrarily and erroneously defined as white and the Palestinians as brown. Therefore one must be on the side of the supposed brown people in order to not be a racist.
(4) Post-modern anti-colonist theory, ditto.
(5) Not only is it considered racist to doubt the word of the Palestinians, but even if a pundit knows the Palestinians are almost certainly lying, the lies are accepted through cultural relativism as a valid custom of downtrodden people. The “higher truth” is that the Israelis are bad and the Palestinians good, so lies are acceptable to further that “narrative.”
South Africa: the ANC and the DA made a deal
Can it last?
I wrote about the results of the recent South African election in this post. The ANC, which has been in power for thirty years, had lost the majority and was forced into a coalition that had yet to be determined.
It turns out that the coalition formed is between the ANC and the more moderate DA (Democratic Alliance), the party which has been a major rival. The ANC leader and current president Ramphosa has been sworn in and employs some lofty rhetoric:
South Africa has begun a “new era”, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced as he was sworn in for a second full term in office.
He remains in office even though his party, the African National Congress (ANC), failed to secure a majority in parliament during last month’s election.
The ANC subsequently made a deal with its long-time rival Democratic Alliance (DA) and other parties to form a coalition government. …
“Through the ballots that they have cast, the people of South Africa have made plain their expectation that the leaders of our country should work together,” President Ramaphosa, 71, said solemnly.
“They have directed their representatives to put aside animosity and dissent, to abandon narrow interests, and to pursue together only that which benefits the nation.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if such a rarity came to pass?
Open thread 6/19/24
There are so many wildflowers this year:
Great video overview of Biden corruption from Miranda Devine
Miranda Devine (literally) wrote the book on Biden corruption, and she was the original reporter of the Hunter laptop. Here she is interviewed by Caroline Glick.
Devine packs a great deal of information into this video, which is well worth watching. My advice – as usual – is that, if you’re impatient like me, click on “settings” and choose a faster speed for the video. I often listen at either 1.5 time or even 1.75 time, sometimes while taking a walk or doing chores around the house and listening through a bluetooth:
How many Democrats do you think are even aware of these allegations? A person wouldn’t know much about them if that person didn’t read or listen to sources on the right, so my guess is that a great many Democrats are ignorant of them and certainly know none of the details or how well-documented they are.
Biden gives amnesty to illegal-alien spouses of citizens
We’ve been told that it was going to happen, and here it is:
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., vowed to investigate President Biden’s “lawless plans for amnesty” and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ “ongoing abuse of parole authority” hours after the administration unveiled new immigration rules shielding migrant spouses of U.S. citizens from deportation.
“Amnesty for illegal aliens is absolutely unacceptable,” Hawley wrote in a letter to Mayorkas on Tuesday morning. “It is a lure that will drive millions more illegal immigrants to flood across our southern border. It is a slap in the face to U.S. taxpayers. And it is totally unfair to immigrants who entered the U.S. legally. But apparently, you and President Biden now plan to do just that.”
Hawley called for Mayorkas to “immediately end” the new policy and said the administration “baldly defied” current immigration law, which permits parole for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit. …
Hawley warned the administration’s new amnesty proposal “is transparently an attempt to curry favor with far-left activist groups, who opposed even President Biden’s toothless rhetoric about border security,” and that “the far left always gets what it wants from this administration—amnesty and a functionally open border.”
The non-citizen spouses must have lived in the US for 10 years or more, which sounds like a somewhat limiting factor. However, I think it’s a case of the camel getting its nose into the tent, in that once this is implemented it can be expanded to include those who have been here a lot less than ten years. Or perhaps it won’t be properly enforced in the first place if it follows the path of so many of our other rules about entry into this country.
It also seems to me that this announcement can be looked at as an expansion of DACA, the policy resulting from an executive action of Obama’s in 2012. Trump tried to end DACA and there were a number of court challenges, but the policy is still in place. DACA didn’t involve spouses, and this new policy of Biden’s does. My guess is that this is another case of Biden trying to placate the left flank of his party – but they always want more.
Bounces off me and sticks to you! says the left of Biden and Trump and their mental and physical sharpness
It gets more and more difficult for our Pravda-esque media to cover up for Biden’s increasing frailties, and so they’ve adopted a new tactic. In a way, it’s an old tactic, because it reminds me of the game we used to play as children when someone insulted us: “Bounces off me and sticks to you!”
A couple of weeks ago I suddenly noticed a large increase in the number of Democrat spokespeople and media outlets implying or outright stating that Donald Trump is senile. Or, as a variation on the theme, that he’s crazy. Or senile and crazy – and “crazy” not just as in “mildly eccentric” (which he’s long been) but “crazy” as in “demented and out of touch with reality.” Now, Trump is many many things, and a lot of those things are things a lot of people don’t like or even hate. But “senile” and/or “crazy” are not among them.
The message about Trump as crazy old coot was disseminated from too many people and in too many places to be an accident; it was obviously a coordinated approach. And now the Biden-defenders have unveiled a new tactic, which is to claim that videos showing Joe Biden to be old, infirm, addled, confused, or any of the things that have been readily apparent for a long time are fakes. It is Joe who’s actually sharp as a tack and able to leap off tall buildings in a single bound.
I now notice that, just a moment ago, Ace has put up a post on this very same topic, saying that the tactic is now just about everywhere in the MSM:
This is a full-court press throughout all the Regime media — they’re all claiming, at once, all using the same language, that all the videos showing Biden wandering off, freezing, and sitting (or shitting) in invisible chairs are “cheap fakes” spread by “right-wing media.”
They’re simultaneously claiming that Trump, who gives two hour speeches without a single note-card, is the Real Mental Invalid Here.
As I said earlier, I first noticed the MSM claiming the latter, starting maybe about two weeks ago. Then just in the last day or two, mostly since the G7 Summit, we’ve gotten the follow-up approach stating that the videos that make Biden look bad are right-wing fakes.
Of course, videos of that nature about Biden have been around for his entire presidency and – funny thing – it’s not been claimed till now that they are fakes. But the left counts on people to have a poor memory or no memory, just as the Soviets counted on their people. Actually, that’s not true; the left knows (and the Soviets knew) that many people do remember, and it doesn’t care. Its propaganda is aimed either at those who don’t pay attention, those who are gullible, and/or those who believe what they wish to believe and are adept at saying 2 plus 2 equals 5.
Orwell knew a lot about that sort of thing. The left practices a form not just of simple lying, but of truth inversion. And it often works.
Open thread 6/18/24
I found this at Ace’s.
Baby turtle vs. fingerboard pic.twitter.com/4u8WTV4Yfj
— Nature is Amazing ?? (@AMAZlNGNATURE) June 16, 2024
The Gates of Vienna are open: Muslim schoolchildren in Vienna
[NOTE: Hat tip, commenter “Snow on Pine.”]
The Gate of Vienna are wide open:
More than one-third of primary school children in Vienna are Muslims, representing the largest religious group among elementary schools in the Austrian capital.
According to figures published by the Education Directorate and cited by the Exxpress news site, 35 percent of primary school students are Muslims, while 21 percent are Catholic, 13 percent are Orthodox, and 2 percent are either Protestant or belong to another denomination.
Just over one in four pupils (26 percent) are classified as non-religious.
The figures show a considerable increase in the number of Muslim children frequenting Austrian primary schools compared to data published for the 2016/2017 academic year when Catholics remained the largest religious group at 31 percent compared to 28 percent of Muslims.
By my calculations, there are a couple of missing percentages. But the general trend is pretty clear, if the figures are basically correct.
Christianity has been experiencing a falling-off in many Western European countries, at the same time that Muslim immigration has been increasing. There is also a differential birthrate:
According to the Federal Agency for Migration and Refugees, between 2014 and 2021 over 2.3 mln alleged “refugees” came to Germany (first and following asylum applications). Around 86 percent of them were of Muslim faith, i.e., 2 mln, which is around 2.5 percent of Germany’s population in 2014. From all the applicants only 6.3 percent were actually deported, i.e., only 147 thousand.
During the same period over 263 thousand alleged “refugees” came to Austria, of which only 11.8 percent (31 thousand) were deported. Given that 72 percent of the asylum seekers were of Muslim faith, this results in a gross influx of 190 thousand Muslims, which corresponds to 2.2 percent of Austria’s population in 2014.
Research by Stonawski et al. (2015) shows that Muslim immigrants have more children on average than their native counterparts: in Germany and Austria the fertility rate for ethnic Germans was 1.4, while it was 2.4 for Muslims. In 2022 the total fertility rate of both nations was 1.5 and 1.44 respectively.
So immigration in these countries is predominantly Muslim, most of the people who come are not deported, and their birthrates are over the replacement rate whereas the birthrates of the native populations are significantly under replacement rate.
The concern isn’t racist, it is cultural. The immigrants tend to bring their culture with them, and it includes anti-Semitism, homophobia, and the like – including, for a not-small percentage, the desire for sharia law in their new home countries.
NOTE: It’s not always easy to get statistics on this, either. For example, Belgium has a law against religious censuses. So estimates are all they’ve got.
Further thoughts on the hostage rescue: their survival was almost miraculous
Here’s a much more detailed description of the Israeli hostage rescue. I’m sure important facts have been left out for security reasons, but enough have been revealed to give a fuller picture than the one we got earlier.
That fuller picture makes it seem almost a miracle that the hostages and their rescuers got out alive. Maybe it actually was a miracle, depending on your belief system.
I suggest you please read the whole thing now, because I’m going to discuss some of my reactions and observations.
(1) When I had just the bare bones of the story, before I had read the article, one thing I wondered was – in the firefight that occurred during the rescue of the three male hostages, when the head of the operation was mortally wounded – how did the Israeli troops somehow manage to protect the hostages and themselves while carrying his body out of the building and bringing him home? The article doesn’t explain exactly how that was done, but it does make clear that he was carried out of there on a stretcher, and that there were medics as part of the original team. So not only did the Israelis prepare for that sort of contingency, but they used precious time and resources to make sure no one was left behind to the tender mercies of the savage Gazan crowd. This was all done under extremely heavy fire.
(2) Prior to reading the article I had already heard of some of the intelligence work prior to the rescue, involving a team of Israelis posing as Arabs and speaking fluent Arabic with a Gazan accent. It had struck me, and not for the first time, that the reason the Israelis could successfully pull that off was that the members of the team probably were Arabs – Israeli Arabs, that is. About 20% of Israeli citizens are Arabs, and I’d wager that most of them have no desire for Hamas to take over Israel and take away the freedoms they enjoy there.
(3) The article makes it crystal clear that the type of combat in which the Israeli team had to engage was enormously difficult and more dramatic than most movies. They were met with an unexpected amount of armed resistance not just on the streets of Gaza as they were trying to get the hostages through the town. but even when they first entered the home where the hostages were being kept.
(4) The hostages had to be very brave, as well, during this operation.
(5) Every single story I’ve read about the hostage rescue operation refers to the site where the hostages were being kept as the “Nuseirat refugee camp,” and that includes the one I’m writing about now. Words matter. The Palestinians and the UN and the NGOs have managed to use these sort of terms to conjure up the image in the readers’ minds of a bunch of makeshift tent cities, full of squalor and lacking basic facilities. But the vast majority of dwellings in the permanent “refugee camps” of Gaza are not like that. They are towns, with shops and homes and all the usual accouterments that towns contain. We should stop calling them “camps” because they are not camps. For that matter, most of the people in them are not “refugees”; they are the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of people who for the most part chose to leave Israel when the UN created the original two-state solution that the Arab world rejected in favor of trying to destroy Israel. And lastly, they’re not really “Palestinians,” they appropriated that term back in the 1960s:
Polls show Trump gaining black voters
With the usual caveats regarding polls, take a look:
Trump has significantly shrunk his deficit with President Joe Biden among black Americans in the six battleground states, with the current president leading the former president 70% to 18%, a May New York Times/Siena College poll found. Enten, on “CNN News Central,” was stunned by how Trump is performing with black Americans as a Republican candidate, as well as how unpopular Biden is becoming with these voters.
Seventy to eighteen isn’t exactly doing poorly, of course. And it’s not nearly as unpopular as Biden should be. But it’s potentially very important, because any decline in black support for Democrats is potentially devastating.
More:
“I keep looking for this to change, to go back to a historical norm and it, simply put, has not yet.”
Depends, of course, on what “history” you’re going back to in order to find your “norm.” For a long time after the Civil War, black voters were Republicans.
More:
In 2020, Joe Biden was getting 86% of the African American vote. Look at where it is now. It’s 70%, that’s a 16-point drop, John,” Enten told host John Berman. “And more than that, it’s not just that Joe Biden is losing ground. It’s that Donald Trump is gaining ground. You go from 7%, single-digits at this point in 2020, to now 21% and again, John, I keep looking for signs that this is going to go back to normal and I don’t see it yet in the polling of anything right now. We’re careening towards a historic performance for a Republican presidential candidate, the likes of which we have not seen in six decades.”
Six decades ago it was 1964, the year of the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
Most of the current movement of black voters towards Trump seems to come from men and in particular younger men (I read that earlier but can’t find the exact source in a quick search at the moment). But again, I would be cautious about believing overmuch in polls.
One thing that occurs to me, though, is that once a previously politically monolithic ethnic group starts turning in the other direction even a little, it could have a cascade effect in which it becomes less shocking for a person in that group to consider affiliating with a previously-despised party and its candidates.