Germany’s war on knives
Germany is planning to curb the number of knife attacks in that country by a new law:
After laying a white rose at the site of the Diversity Festival slashing that left three dead and eight wounded, Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised rapid action would be taken against knives.
Right now, people in Germany can carry knives up to 4.7 inches long. The law will be modified so that they can only carry knives up to 2.4 inches long. No one appears to have considered the possibility that Muslim terrorists on the way to killing as many infidels as possible might violate the law and carry a concealed knife of 4 inches or longer. Such thoughts are unthinkable.
Knives are ubiquitous; they are not the problem. And of course a murderer won’t hesitate to carry such a knife, which will be easily obtainable. Then again, maybe the next step for the authorities is to give us all plastic utensils and make all knives contraband, like in prisons.
More:
The ISIS terrorist [who attacked people at the Diversity Festival] was one of over a million migrants who had invaded Germany while claiming to be “refugees”. The migrant was also one of the many scheduled to be deported, but was not.
All that the Muslim terrorist had to do to evade deportation was leave government housing when the authorities came looking for him. And then when the military-age Arab Muslim migrant came back, the deportation order had expired and he couldn’t be deported. Undeported Muslim refugees have been one of the largest sources of terrorism, crime and violence in Europe.
Some statistics:
The mostly Muslim migrants were responsible for over 1 in 10 sexual assaults in just one year. They have carried out around 7,000 sexual assaults since the beginning of the migrant crisis. Half of gang rapists are foreigners, and there are on average almost two gang rapes committed in Germany every single day.
In North Rhine-Westphalia, the state where the latest Muslim terrorist attack took place, 1 in 3 sex offenders, half of shoplifters and burglars, and 4 out of 5 pickpockets were foreigners.
Typical of this kind of violence was an altercation between two Arab Muslims, which ended with one of them stabbed in Magdeburg, migrants fighting with knives in a refugee center in Bavaria, and a litany of young foreign men confronting and stabbing each other all across Germany.
But locating the source of the problem is probably “not a very helpful insight,” [the quote is from a German criminologist] … In the UK, people sharing such insights are being locked up even as Islamic terrorists are being freed.
Free speech is dead in Britain.
NOTE: While writing this post, the phrase “long knives” came to me, because Germany is aiming to ban the carrying of long knives. That in turn brought to mind the famous Nazi “Night of the Long Knives,” which took place in 1934 and was a mechanism for Hitler’s consolidation of power by eliminating the group in his own party known as the Brownshirts, as well as many others he considered enemies or rivals and expendable. I doubt that knives were the mechanism by which they died; I’m almost certain everyone was summarily shot. So whence comes the name? When I did a Google search, the AI function initially said the people were killed by knives, which I strongly suspect is one of those things AI makes up because it sounds good. A second Google search for the same thing had the AI function saying they were primarily shot, and the name “Long Knives” was symbolic. Make up your non-mind, AI!
This site says the name was given by Hitler himself, and that it was a phrase from a popular Nazi song. He explained after the fact in a speech: “In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I become the supreme judge of the German people. I gave the order to shoot the ringleaders in this treason.”
California bans local governments from requiring IDs in local elections
Voters in the city of Huntington Beach, California passed an amendment to the city charter that would require ID in order to vote in municipal elections. Also:
The measure is slated to take effect in 2026 and would also allow Huntington Beach officials to “provide more in-person voting locations” and “monitor ballot drop-boxes.”
We can’t have that, can we? Let’s hear it for DEMOCRACY!! – that is, for the Democrat Party. Those Huntington Beach voters need to get in line with the Democratic Party, which immediately began legal action to stop the law from taking effect and presented the now-familiar argument that it is a form of voter suppression. You’ve heard that claim before – it’s become a foundation of the Democrats’ efforts to suppress voting security and voting integrity.
And then, when so many voters begin to doubt the validity of voting results, Democrats accuse them of crazy conspiracy theories.
And now the state of California has passed its own state law forbidding municipalities from doing what Huntington Beach tried to do, even for local elections and not state elections. Democrats in California are so dominant in the state legislature that it passed overwhelmingly:
SB 1174 stipulates that local governments “shall not enact or enforce any charter provision, ordinance, or regulation requiring a person to present identification for the purpose of voting or submitting a ballot at any polling place, vote center, or other location where ballots are cast or submitted, unless required by state or federal law.” The measure cleared the State Assembly (57-16) on Tuesday and was previously passed by the state Senate (30-8) in May.
Now the question is whether Newsom will sign it into law.
The Harris and Walz interview was a lackluster and awkward affair
In last night’s CNN interview with Dana Bash, Kamala Harris exhibited problems on two levels: content and process. Content is what a person says, and process is just about everything else, including tone of voice, facial expression, and posture.
It seems to me that, even objectively speaking, this interview wasn’t the sort of thing that would convince anyone not already a Harris voter to support her. Much of the content of the interview involved Harris trying to explain her past statements that are at variance with what she’s saying now, and her failure to do anything about so many of the country’s problems even though she’s been vice president for three and a half years. Although a very effective speaker might be able to give some sort of convincing explanations and/or excuses for those things despite the fact that it’s difficult to think of any, Kamala is not that speaker.
Which brings us to the second problem: process. Last night Kamala Harris transmitted a lackluster energy, a hesitancy, and a problem with what many pundits evaluating her performance called authenticity. Her words, and in particular her tone of voice and facial expressions, seemed manufactured and mismatched – not in the slick and practiced way of Hillary Clinton, for example, but in an awkward way that was unsettling to watch.
It didn’t help that Tim Walz was part of the equation, leading to the almost inevitable mockery of Harris as needing her Dad there for emotional support. The taunting boiled down to the idea that, if she’s such a strong woman, why would he be there at all for this interview? Good question, and to make things worse there was another problem: the seating and perspective. Harris was in the center of the three participants, but she looked somewhat shrunken not only because Walz is a much larger person, but also because she was further back from the camera than either Walz or Bash. Her position made it even more difficult to convey power, and only fed the perception of lack of force on her part. Here’s an article at RedState that gives many examples of people pointing that out.
As for the content of Harris’ message, here’s some fact-checking that shows that even CNN was at least somewhat critical:
When Bash again noted that Harris said in 2019 that she supported a ban on fracking, and asked Harris if she changed her mind during that campaign (which Harris ended in December 2019), Harris said, “In 2020, I made very clear where I stand. We are in 2024 and I’ve not changed that position, nor will I going forward.”
Facts First: This is misleading. Harris did not make her position on fracking clear during her only debate in 2020, the general election’s vice presidential debate against then-Vice President Mike Pence; Harris never explicitly stated a personal position on fracking during that debate. Rather, she said that Joe Biden, the head of the Democratic ticket at the time, would not ban fracking if he was elected president.
Harris has another built-in content problem when asked about her support of Joe Biden. She was a loyal VP who pooh-poohed any talk of him being cognitively challenged, and now she’s the current nominee because everyone saw how seriously cognitively challenged he actually is. But to turn on him now would be to exhibit disloyalty, as well as implicating her in the obvious coverup. Threading that needle is beyond her, and what she did in the Dana Bash interview was to reiterate her support of Biden – the person whose record has also been one from which she desperately wants to distance herself.
The Trump War Room quickly made use of a clip of that moment:
? Kamala says she has NO REGRETS about covering up Crooked Joe Biden's obvious cognitive decline — and LYING to the American people pic.twitter.com/FMkLhhSqWw
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 30, 2024
I had originally thought that Harris’ and Walz’s decision to appear together for this interview was an attempt to spark a perception in the viewer of a genial Mom and Dad taking care of America and Americans. They may have thought that the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts, but I don’t think they succeeded.
Or maybe they just wanted to get it over with. How many interviews will Harris give in the next two months? Or will she try to continue to convey a lukewarm version of Obama’s “hope and change” in 2008 while simultaneously hiding out like Joe Biden in 2020?
Open thread 8/30/24
I love this couple. And of course, I love this song and I love Mark Knopfler:
If you’re watching the Kamala/Walz cameo on CNN …
… here’s a thread to discuss it.
Caroline Glick on the anti-Semitic takeover of the Democrat Party and a prospective Harris administration
Here’s the excerpt; it’s about seven and a half minutes long and quite chilling:
Traveling to Europe? It’s getting more “interesting”
Even if you’re not Pavel Durov, you may get a surprise if you’re planning a trip to Europe. Beginning November 10, there will be mandatory biometrics applied to visitors:
Europe’s new Entry/Exit System is intended to replace passport stamping by electronically registering the arrival and departure of international visitors to and from most EU member states.
Upon arrival in Europe, passport control officers will scan your face, record a digital scan of your fingerprints—these scans will be mandatory—and not stamp your passport.
When visitors leave Europe, they’ll scan face and fingers once again to register their departure.
Visitors will be able to speed their first arrival at a European border by pre-registering using a mobile app (not yet available) or the automated kiosks (which the EU calls “self-service systems”) installed at major border entry ports such as airports.
Once you’re registered with EES, the next time you cross an external European border, you’ll only have to scan your face and fingers for reentry. …
One system (ETIAS) will validate approval to travel; the other (EES) is for registering a person’s arrival once travel begins and, later, departure once the visit is over. …
Every person crossing an external European border who is not also an EU national—which by definition includes every tourist staying for a maximum of 90 days in any 180-day period—will be required to register with the new EES. In other words, pretty much everyone who goes to Europe on vacation.
Travelers who carry biometric passports (all U.S. passports issued since 2007 are biometric) can also speed through the automated “self-service system” kiosks (a prototype is pictured above) once those travelers’ details have been registered in the database for the first time.
… The United States began requiring non-Americans between the ages of 14 and 79 to submit fingerprint scans and facial images nearly 20 years ago.
That’s a lot to digest. One tidbit that surprised me was the claim that since 2007 all US passports are biometric. I have a passport issued in 2015 and I was unaware of any biometrics involved in the document itself. But I do recall that, when I went to Italy in 2017, my face was scanned at the Rome airport coming and going. I also think my photo is sometimes taken at US airports, but I’m a bit hazy on that detail. But what’s in my actual passport that qualifies as biometrics? It doesn’t have my fingerprints, and I don’t ever recall giving fingerprints.
The larger picture, and what I’ve thought about many times before, is that these days there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide – that is, if the state wants to find you. Funny thing is that the people they most want to find seem to be those on the right, and this involves Western Europe, too. The emphasis on getting the right in the US has already been proven – as though we needed more proof – by the incredible dragnet that hauled in J6 attendees whose “offenses” were limited to walking through open doors and entering the Capitol, and then peacefully exiting. I seem to recall that the mechanism for identifying most of them was facial recognition techniques through surveillance photos and videos.
I take all news about Sinwar with a grain of salt
But anyway, for what it’s worth:
Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip are mulling staging a coup against Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, according to a report on the UK new site The Jewish Chronicle.
This comes amid deep divides over the terms of a ceasefire deal with Israel to end the fighting, the report said.
Sinwar is also reportedly surrounded with 22 living Israeli hostages, who are handcuffed and used as human shields against assassination attempts. Israel, it is claimed, has had several opportunities to eliminate him, but has restrained itself due to the risk of harming its captives. The report also mentioned that the rest of the hostages are held by smaller Palestinian terrorist factions.
Something of the sort may indeed be true. Or not. And “the rest of the hostages” – the living ones – constitutes an unknown number.
We did get a report from newly-rescued hostage Farhan al-Qadi:
Aryeh Zalmanovich, 86, was named Thursday as the Israeli hostage who died beside Farhan al-Qadi, the hostage who was rescued alive on Tuesday, while the two were held captive together in Gaza.
Zalmanovich, who was abducted from his home in Kibbutz Nir Oz during Hamas’s October 7 terror onslaught, died about five weeks into his captivity, according to al-Qadi.
Zalmanovich, a father of two and grandfather of five, was already known to have died in captivity, with Kibbutz Nir Oz announcing his death on December 1, 2023. The terror group had previously published a video in mid-November in which it showed Zalmanovich looking ill.
Following his rescue on Tuesday, al-Qadi asked to connect with Boaz Zalmanovich, the late hostage’s son, Boaz told Kan radio on Thursday. “It was very important” to al-Qadi to speak with the family, Boaz said, and they spoke briefly even as al-Qadi was being welcomed back to Rahat on Wednesday. “I hope we’ll have a more organized conversation” in the future, he said.
Al-Qadi told Boaz that he and Zalmanovich were taken to a hospital in southern Gaza, where they were kept for the first few weeks of the war. In captivity, Zalmanovich told al-Qadi about his family and community. …
Boaz said al-Qadi told him that there was a special connection between the two hostages.
“Dad was in a hospital the whole time, he wasn’t moved, and Farhan was with him for certain stages,” Boaz said.
“I understand from Farhan that they had a special bond. [Farhan] was also wounded, but he still helped take care of Dad — not in a medical way, more in terms of giving him support.” Boaz said that learning of al-Qadi’s support for Zalmanovich in captivity was “very important to us.” …
The conditions in which the hostages are being held are clearly not tenable “for a man of 86, or a man aged 20, or a baby…,” he said. “There is no [proper] care… Even if some of the hostages have had wounds bandaged or had surgery, that does not prevent their murder in captivity… in the tunnels or wherever they are. (Zalmanovich was beaten during his abduction, and was taken to Gaza without his glasses or his hearing aid, according to Channel 12.)
When you beat and then kidnap a man of 86 and he dies in captivity you have murdered him. But I believe Hamas is responsible for any deaths of hostages. It strikes me that it’s been almost a year now, which is mind-boggling.
I’m very happy for al-Qadi and his family. And here are a few details of the story of al-Qadi’s rescue:
Israeli special forces, acting on intelligence, were combing a network of tunnels in southern Gaza when they found Al-Qadi, two Israeli military officials told CNN. Al-Qadi was alone, without his Hamas captors, when Israeli forces found him, one of the officials said.
Al-Qadi is the eighth hostage to be rescued alive in Gaza by the Israeli military since the beginning of the war, in four separate operations – but he is the first to have been reclaimed alive from inside Hamas’ tunnel network underneath Gaza, the IDF told CNN.
“He was dead and is now brought back to life,” Al-Qadi’s brother, Juma’a, told CNN after Al-Qadi met family members at the Soroka Medical Center in Beer Sheva, where he is being cared for following his rescue. He added that his brother had not expected to come back alive.
“It was all tears. Tears of joy. What matters is that we saw him,” Juma’a said during an interview in the Bedouin village of Tarabin, in Israel’s Negev desert. …
Al-Qadi was discharged from hospital on Wednesday afternoon, the Soroka Medical Center said. In a press briefing, Al-Qadi expressed his gratitude to the soldiers who rescued him and the medical team at Soroka, the same hospital where he was born. Already making use of his new freedom, he said “I got shawarma at 2 a.m.” …
“It is hard for him to erase the things he saw there,” Juma’a said, adding that he too would never fully recover from losing his brother for nearly a year.
I can well believe it.
One of the things this story underlines is that yes, there are plenty of Arab citizens of Israel. They are Israelis, too:
[From the former mayor of Tarabin]: He told me that captivity was brutal. Constant darkness, did not see the light of day. He was treated like the rest of the hostages, like an Israeli in every way.
Like an Israeli in every way.
The article also says that al-Qadi’s captors may have fled at the approach of the Israeli soldiers in the tunnel. If so, the minders apparently weren’t so keen to martyr themselves:
Another one of Al-Qadi’s brothers, Abu Mohammad, suggested to CNN that his captors had fled when they heard Israeli troops approaching the tunnels, saying his brother had heard Hebrew voices and shouted out to communicate his whereabouts.
Asked by CNN’s Jim Sciutto on Tuesday if he believes Al-Qadi’s captors abandoned him, IDF spokesperson Nadav Shoshani said that was “one of the options that are being looked at.”
It seems – and again, there’s no way to know if the details are true – that al-Qadi may have been found during a tunnel-clearing operation and that the troops had not already been aware of his presence through previous intelligence. But we don’t know – and may never know.
Open thread 8/29/24
Walz will be present with Harris in her first major interview …
… which will also be by a very friendly interviewer, Dana Bash, and it will be recorded rather than live.
The friendly interviewer part was pretty much a given. After all, there are few Harris-hostile potential interviewers in the MSM, and why would Harris ever purposely seek one out?
The non-live aspect of it makes sense, too, for the same reason. If the interviewer and the news outlet is friendly, airing a recorded interview gives them time to edit out any errors Harris might make. And many viewers won’t even realize it’s been done. On the other hand, politicians on the right would prefer live interviews because the same time lag gives the news outlet time to edit the interview in order to make the conservative look as bad as possible.
But what of Walz’s presence? I’ve noticed that, so far, quite a bit of the Harris social media presence features back-and-forth schtick with Walz. I saw someone online call Walz her “emotional support animal” – which is not only pretty humorous but may be fastening on a truth, which is that this woman portrayed as mega-strong is bothered by a feeling of insecurity about her ability to weather interviews or press conferences and would like her running mate to be by her side.
That may be true, but I also think that Harris may feel that presenting Harris/Walz as a team as often as possible reassures voters reluctant to vote for a female president that Walz will be a big part of the administration if they win. His supposedly avuncular – or Dad-like – teddy bear quality is apparently what the left believes to be his big selling point. So I think in this interview we have some sort of attempt at the message that Mom and Dad will take care of us, the dependent but beloved children.
The defamation lawsuit against Raffensperger of Georgia
Somehow I’d previously missed this news, but it’s worth paying attention to: it involves our old friend Brad Raffensperger (see previous posts of mine about him, for example this one). He’s presently being sued for defamation concerning the following:
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is facing a powerful defamation lawsuit arising from false claims he made about a Republican election volunteer in his 2021 book “Integrity Counts.” He wrote and published that a video presentation of unsupervised ballot counting at State Farm Arena in Atlanta had been “doctored,” “chopped up,” “cut,” “sliced up,” and “deceptively sliced and edited so that it appeared to show the exact opposite of reality,” allegedly including a “slice of video that had removed the clear evidence” that the law had been followed.
None of that was true. Jacki Pick, a Republican volunteer on the Trump legal team, was the sole presenter of the video to Georgia legislators to show that Republican election observers’ claims about unsupervised ballot counting in Georgia’s largest county were true. While she did not show the entire 20 hours of the video in her 12-minute presentation, nothing she showed was edited, chopped up, sliced, or diced, in any way.
Raffensperger published the self-promotional book in November 2021 as part of his campaign for re-election. It came a year after he oversaw one of the most controversial state elections of 2020. He had faced a deluge of criticism from election integrity advocates over various decisions he and his office made in the run up to and aftermath of the 2020 election. …
In August of 2024, Raffensperger ran to his allies at left-wing propaganda outlets The New York Times and CNN to have them mischaracterize the defamation lawsuit and help him personally raise money to fight it. “Defying Trump Over Election Costs a Republican, Literally,” blared the front page headline of the New York Times, which claimed that he had spent $500,000 to fight the lawsuit.
In fact, the lawsuit has nothing to do with “defying Trump” in 2020. Rather it deals with the words Raffensperger published one year later in his book about Pick’s video presentation.
There’s much more at the link.
In that old post of mine I linked earlier, I speculated on what’s going on with Raffensperger, who is a Republican. Here’s something I think was the motive for his behavior in 2020, and which I think is still operating with him:
This seems to be an example of a Republican SOS pushing for extreme liberalization of voting laws due to COVID fear, and a GOP legislature trying to fight him but failing to succeed. I also wouldn’t discount the influence on Raffensperger of fear of Stacey Abrams and her leftist money and her ability to win in court by accusing the GOP opposition of racism, and I suspect that’s a partial explanation for Raffensperger’s cave. …
… this is another example of GOP infighting, in which it seems to me that Raffensperger’s main concern (even perhaps his sole concern) is protecting himself against accusations that he had any role in the [2020] debacle.