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Republicans

Journal Journal: We're not recycling that old conspiracy again, are we? 19

Bringing out the old greatest hits again, I guess (just like his Dear Leader)

The whole NWO / Illuminati conspiracy subscribes to the same logical fallacy of the "CRT" bullshit. Smitty and his Team can keep taking credit for warding it off as long as it never happens, and hence use it as justification for supporting their fascist candidates who promise to continue working to prevent it from happening. They're just a small leap from taking credit for the earth having not been hit by another catastrophic asteroid since the dinosaurs; I can't come up with a good reason why their current cult leader hasn't claimed credit for that, honestly.
User Journal

Journal Journal: VDH: "Our Three Blind Mice" 55

Our Three Blind Mice

"Three blind mice. Three blind mice.
See how they run. See how they runâ¦"

The recent testimonies of the three university presidents (Claudine Gay of Harvard, Sally Kornbluth of MIT, and [soon to be departed?] University of Pennsylvania's Liz McGill) concerning their inaction about endemic anti-Semitism on their campuses have probably done more damage to higher education than any recent event in memory. (And note there was not a white, male, heterosexual supposed oppressor to be found among the enlightened).

We know they know they failed because two at least clumsily tried damage repair over the next few days that only confirmed their initial stupidity. And a herd of other scared university presidents suddenly have now issued their own memoranda professing their supposed zero tolerance politics for anti-Semitism on campus.

Still, do not believe that any are too sincere given they remain for now still more afraid of their DEI/woke/hard left faculty and students than they are of alumni, donors, or us the taxpayers.

But note the following:

1) The three blind mice could not even lie well. Like nearly all contemporary university presidents, they have long revoked admissions, suspended students, or relieved faculty from teaching for any language, expression, or advocacy they considered incorrect, which translates as anything not compatible with wokism or DEI.

Invoking 'freedom of speech' to disguise their moral cowardice is pathetic when they have never on their campuses believed in freedom of speech. One incorrect word about someone trans, a misplaced pronoun, or a clumsy reference to a non-white student, and the offender would be punished immediately--followed by the usual performance-art, virtue-signaling, "this is not who we are"/"there is no place for such hatred on this campus" memo from a careerist dean or bully provost.

Instead, they have excused their censorship by arguing that in their campus enclaves, as in a corporation, they have the right to set their own codes of behavior--without taxpayers subsidies.

But the issue is not so much "free speech", but the equal application of rules and laws. These presidents adhere to systemic prejudice, in which free speech and rules of behavior are predicated on ideology as well as race and ethnicity. Worse still, they cloak such neanderthal reactionaryism in gobbledygook progressive platitudes.

In their ridiculous white-oppressor/non-, white-oppressed reductionist world, advocating the destruction of Israel, and the Jewish people with it, is no big deal. Indeed, it pays dividends among their DEI and foreign student constituencies.

So they are upset not that they have de facto institutionalized anti-Semitism to such a degree that it is now inviting physical assaults on their own students, but that they have been caught and called out on it.

Bottom line: the nation learned that these people don't care about their own campuses cheering on mass rape, mutilation, and beheading or calling for the extinction of Israel and all the Jews in it, because Jews as whites are on the wrong side of their victim/victimizer DEI binary, and suffer the additional wage of anti-Semitism.

There is no career upside in their twisted worlds in defending Jews in Israel--or anywhere--from precivilizational barbarism.

2) All of these elite university presidents supposedly were once top scholars, seasoned faculty, and experienced deans and provosts. In other words, they are the purported best and brightest of what academia now has to offer us.

And it turns out to be not much at all.

Note in minutes they were utterly eviscerated by Republican congressional representatives with no such academic credentials, but with plenty of intelligence, logic, street smarts and common sense acquired from politics or business or non-academic experience.

When the president of Harvard or MIT is rendered a moral pygmy and intellectual lightweight by our local congressional representatives, it warns us of what higher education has become and perhaps reminds why academics should be kept as far away from governance as possible. (Professors--e.g., a Woodrow Wilson or Barack Obama--usually have proved poor if not dangerous presidents).

After such skilled grilling, we owe a great deal of respect for the abilities and moral sense of these Republican House members.

3) The only reason the three showed any remorse or the next day tried to reset, was transitory fear of financial consequences, as in being blamed for a temporary drop-off in donations.

But that reality underscores that we the people do have power over even our elite and private universities and can rescue them from themselves, if we understand that those who feign a supposed disdain for money are the most eager to acquire it, as we saw with the Bankman-Fried trio.

In other words, the taxpayer can reign in a Harvard or MIT--should the U.S. government condition billions of dollars in annual subsidies to campuses on non-discriminatory policies, reconsider tax-exemptions for university giving, tax their endowment income until higher education is truly disinterested and non-partisan, and remove the government from the $2 trillion student loan racket that ensures tuition inflation, administrative bloat, and generations of youth suffering from arrested development.

User Journal

Journal Journal: d_r's really not trying hard enough 31

Smitty's new / old conspiracy of the week! just isn't cutting it in the breathlessness department.

To get d_r worked up into a full lather, I suggest viewing the latest Tucker on X:

Ep. 46 The Alex Jones Interview

TIMESTAMPS:

2:46 Alex Jones predictions
15:07 Deplatforming
21:59 Dividing us on race
25:37 The border
28:09 Austin
32:12 New World Order
42:09 Brian Stelter demon video
50:57 Depopulation
1:07:51 Food
1:13:51 Whiskey
1:16:22 Presidential election

I didn't "watch" this. I took it in at 1.5X while out for a walk. The Stelter passage, even audio-only, was precisely why I had always thought Jones a buffoon. I'm still short of fully Jones-pilled in a granular way.

On the one hand, I can understand a Commander-in-Chief undertaking strategic, wartime decisions that are going to cost lives. That is the sheer ugliness of the job.

Understanding that the C-in-C can take wartime, military risks is one thing. The idea that 9/11 was an inside job, and that the C-in-C would sacrifice civilian lives, even to protect "sources and methods" is a harder sell.

That said, the broad sweep of the technocratic New World Order, with the WEF, depopulation, Replacement Theory, and the rest is quite near-fetched. Government corruption, e.g. 06Jan, is obvious and disgusting.

Hot, shrieking denials of the facts unfolding in front of us from d_r are so much insect buzzing.
Republicans

Journal Journal: Smitty's new / old conspiracy of the week! 24

Yeah, it's the old "January 6th was an inside job because ... because ... because ... I don't like your team!".

He's played this card before, of course. I just don't know that I mentioned in specifically. This time after smitty started with a classic bit of his trolling, he eventually found himself needing to bring up his conspiracy on January 6th .

While this is in no way a new conspiracy, I will give it credit that it returns to the old form of being an un-disprovable one. Every possible counter just leads to another "whatabout" type response. Even if every person on all the films (ignoring of course the hundreds if not thousands of hours of tape that have been "lost" by Speaker Johnson) were identified by name and handled accordingly, there would still be allegations of shadows, shadow organizations, photoshop, and the like.
User Journal

Journal Journal: The Hideout 11

Gone are the old-bold days. Rosebud.

I wonder if Cheezeburger Brown saw The Meep was a wolf in sheep's clothing villain in the throwback 10th Doctor.

Heh, villAIn...

User Journal

Journal Journal: Just to Clear the Decks 3

1. I am the one who isn't partisan--you guys are.
2. While sarcastic and given to hyperbole, I'm never lying--others may be fibbing, though.
3. The one who is transparent and never projects is me. You guys do all of the projecting.
4. My ideas are the ones that will break the status quo and lead to reform. You guys are the ones explicitly or implicitly supporting the ancien régime.
5. Whoever is treating their faction or leader with excessive regard, it ain't me.
6. The goalposts do not move. It's maximal individual liberty before God, or bust. And it looks like we're craving the latter.

OK, now that all of the bollocks are out of the way, I will point to this post whenever the conversation circles any of these drains.
Republicans

Journal Journal: Bonus Second Smitty Conspiracy in the Same Week! 42

Because of course all hard-core GOP fanbois want our country to thrive and everyone to do well, smitty followed up with this concrete prediction:

all of the de-railings, power grid drops, and overt terrorist strikes occur next year.

Which somehow relates to the things that haven't changed at the border since Biden's inauguration in 2021.

Republicans

Journal Journal: Another Smitty Conspiracy Bubbles Up! 50

I don't know if something happened to his turkey at Thanksgiving, but Smitty is now proudly parading a new anti-Biden conspiracy here on slasdhot for us:

BHO stayed in DC after DJT was sworn in to manage the anti-Trump resistance, and then install a meat puppet in 2020.

Because apparently now it is a crime for anyone who is not of the Trump-publican party to ever be seen in Washington DC after they are no longer an elected official. Does this mean that the images of Obama surfing in Hawaii after the dawn of the Trump Administration were deepstate fakes? And that he never actually moved back to the Chicago area at all? And that he didn't actually fly to Davos? How many body doubles are out running around in place of Obama to distract us from this air-tight conspiracy?

And more importantly, how many of Trump's failures can be blamed on this directly?

Of course, don't forget that this all ties to Barack HUSSEIN Obama. Don't forget about that scary, scary, scary, oh-so-very scary, I-hope-you're-super-duper-terrified-now, scary, did-I-mention-scary, middle name!

In a more rational universe, the GOP would be trying to run a competent and intelligent candidate for POTUS. Instead they have a fascist idiot running on his ego, whipping his cult into a frenzy.

User Journal

Journal Journal: damn_registrars for the Trifecta 58

It's almost a left-handed form of poetry:

You certainly didn't accuse GWB of being a stand-in for his father, or of his father of being a stand-in for Reagan just because they brought a lot of people with from previous administrations.

Whataboutism

The only reason why your Dear Leader had possibly fewer people in his administration who were from previous administrations of his same party were because he was fond of having ass-kissing yes men underneath him. Had he been smart enough to hire intelligent and qualified people (which of course he is and was himself neither) he would have likely had an administration that looked a lot like that of GWB.

Non-sequitur

Naturally, hiring ass-kissing yes men for an administration is also a common trait of a fascist leader. Fascists like your Dear Leader often lack thick enough skin to handle being told they are wrong in any way, shape, or form.

Ad hominem

---

Stay beautiful, d_r: stay_beautiful.

The Military

Journal Journal: What is the Netanyahu Gaza End Game? 66

Conservatives have been tripping over each other to praise Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They claim that the Israeli attacks on Gaza are somehow very precise and targeted. He claims that Hamas is the target, and that they will eradicate Hamas.

The question I haven't seen answered though is what will he do with Gaza when/if he accomplishes that goal? Conservatives here and in Israel are happy to allow people to confuse Hamas with Gaza, and even more so Hamas with the population of Gaza. But even if he found a list of everyone who is part of Hamas and had them all killed, what happens then?

It is important to note that Hamas has a majority in the politics of Gaza because Israel has ensured they would. Israel has prevented elections from happening in Gaza, and now there has not been one there for 15 years. There are already people who have been elected, died, and not been replaced. Simultaneously because Israel controls immigration in and out of Gaza, they have prevented people from leaving.

So what would happen if all of Hamas were indeed killed off in this conflict? You then have a country with no ruling government. We've seen that the Netanyahu government does not want to see elections happen in Gaza, nor does it want to see people achieve any kind of economic or geopolitical mobility from within Gaza. Who then will they acknowledge as the leaders of Gaza?
User Journal

Journal Journal: Blasphemy Against St. George Floyd 7

via d_r's favorite blog, PowerLine

Alpha News presents The Fall of Minneapolis. Alpha has just posted the crowdfunded film to Rumble (video below) so that it can be seen free of charge by the widest possible audience. The film is also accessible online at The Fall of Minneapolis. Viewers can contribute to support Alpha's work and help promote the film here. I attended the film's premiere at a showing for invited guests on Tuesday evening at a local theater. Hayley Feland reported on the premiere in this Alpha story. The film is based on Alpha News journalist Liz Collin's Amazon bestseller Theyâ(TM)re Lying: The Media, The Left, and The Death of George Floyd. The book and the film provide a contrarian take on the prevailing narrative surrounding George Floyd's death and the trial of Derek Chauvin as well as a powerful portrait of the consequences for Minneapolis.

I understand that contradicting a Holy Narrative this way makes me, somehow, personally culpable for every bad thing that ever happened to anyone with relatively more skin pigment than I, if I have understood the Doctrine of Equity correctly. If only I could have cared less, I suppose.

Sardonic humor aside, George Floyd's death is tragic. The ripple effects, in my opinion, have piled evil upon tragedy, and have not fully run their course. The country badly needs reform from the individual heart on outward.

Republicans

Journal Journal: The real Trump gets just as much support 71

I've pointed out more than a few times that Trump - and the GOP under him - is a fascist party that hopes itself to be on the rise. There is plenty of video now of Trump directly borrowing Nazi rhetoric at a rally to get his supporters riled up. Naturally, because like any other fascist - aspiring or otherwise - he cannot allow himself to be wrong in front of a crowd, he had his campaign actually dial it forward rather than back in response to concerns raised by the public.

One odd little twist in that line - a likely whistle for his supporters - he still called his opponents "fascists" in his bit. Not a surprise there, of course, as his party has favored attacking the English Language itself for some time. I expect they'll come up with a cheerier word for their movement than fascism, to better sell it to their supporters.
User Journal

Journal Journal: "a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution" 46

Inside Mike Johnson's Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution

For the last 10 years, the "Convention of States" movement has sought to remake the Constitution and force a tea party vision of the framers' intent upon America. This group wants to wholesale rewrite wide swaths of the U.S. Constitution in one fell swoop. In the process, they hope to do away with regulatory agencies like the FDA and the CDC, virtually eliminate the federal government's ability to borrow money, and empower state legislatures to override federal law.

Now, fustakrakitch rightly blames the voters for the collapse of everything around us, but goes Full Bircher at the idea of those voters supporting a Convention of States

I endorse the COS as the only likely shot at improvement. If we can "just add a variable" (as fustakrakitch put it) The Powers That Be variable isn't going to accept any sort of reform.

What's needed is some analysis. The original, agrarian, island nation Constitution of 1787 is like a local machine script in your tool of choice that was put in production and has simply become swamped. The basic ideas, as Amended, are largely sound, but the feedback loops that should keep it stabilized were removed a century back by Woodrow, and the system has gone unstable.

Congress doesn't actually legislate; the Executive and its agencies (alphabet organizations especially) run amok and essentially unchecked; the sclerotic SCOTUS is awash in Commie fools and trying not to get shot for making feeble attempts to preserve the Constitution.

Mike Johnson seems like a straight shooter, but may prove too little, too late. We'll see. America can be great again, but there is much Commie folly that needs to be puked out to get the country back on course, and the Eminence Orange cannot be the only means of getting there.

Iphone

Journal Journal: How Did iTunes Turn Out So Badly? 9

Yes, this is a silly first world problem.

But my job requires me to interact with my work iPhone more often than a lot of people in my age bracket would otherwise do voluntarily. My work provides me with both an iPhone and a Chevy Equinox (both of which are due to be replaced in the next 6 months or less). Using the two together has been ... interesting.

For reference I'm complaining about a 2021 Equinox, and an iPhone 12. This is more about the latter than the former.

I will argue that iTunes is a mess in two important places. First, in the car it is worthless. Second, on my work laptop (which runs windows) it is awful when I most need it to be useful.

In the car, I would think that iTunes would be a competent music player. I am sorely disappointed on that expectation. I imagine it does a good job playing music, but in the car is has no index or search function. I can't even call for Siri to play music for me. If I start iTunes in the car (simply as "Music" in the car through CarPlay), it shows me the 10 tracks I listened to most recently. I have thousands of tracks that I took the time to copy to my iTunes library, and it arbitrarily tells me about the ones with the most recent time stamps. If I don't want to listen to those, I don't get any other options in the car.

By comparison if I instead put all that music on a USB stick and plug it in to the USB port on my dash, my car will let me search through it all I want. It tragically does a completely horse-shit job of playing tracks in order from an album, but it at least lets me seek them out however I want while I'm driving.

Second, iTunes makes one really terrible assumption on the laptop. This assumption has bit me twice now when I've been away from home with my phone and my laptop. I've tried to install an IOS update on my phone through my laptop, which should be straightforward. Connect to iTunes, start the install. Great. Then it reboots the phone to continue. Then it downloads more stuff to complete the download, or it checks something against something else online, or it sends money to the upkeep of the Steve Jobs museum, or it does some other internet stuff.

Not great.

Why is that not great? Because I'm using my phone as my hotspot. And now the phone has been rebooted into a state that it can't escape from until that next step is completed online. And my laptop can't get online because it has no hotspot available. Around and around we go, until the phone gives up and eventually reboots to only show an address:

support.apple.com/iphone/recover

Which, for reasons already mentioned, I can't load. Eventually I find another way to get online where I learn the secret code to reboot the phone, which doesn't help. Then I drive to some place with good WiFi and try again, with a different secret gesture on the phone. I "update" - which means recover in a non-destructive manner in this case - my phone and then it's working again.

Yeah, yeah. First world problems. I expect smitty will respond telling me that Barack Obama is behind this, presumably trying to slow down senior citizens from voting in Florida to help Biden's reelection chances. Fusta will respond telling me that if I voted all third-party in 2024 this problem would be guaranteed to go away by November 12th.

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