Enjoy Joe Rogan and Dave Smith slamming CNN’s fundamental dishonesty:
@joerogan and @ComicDaveSmith Destroy #FakeNewsCNN and @brianstelter đđđđđ
— Political Corruption Exposed – Illinois (@IllinoisExposed) February 11, 2022
Plus Russell Brand’s hilarious impersonation of Brian Stelter, and some takedowns of the Russiagate and Bountygate lies.
Ben Shapiro has thoughts on The Great Democratic Party pivot discussed yesterday.
All over the world, people are realizing that this is stupid and then it’s time to end it. The problem for Joe Biden is that he’s been stuck in “I will end COVID mode,” and he’s now created an entirely paranoid set of American citizens who believe the minute you take off a mask, you’ll be struck by the wrath of God.
When your worldview is completely off, you have two choices: One, shift your worldview and announce that you made a mistake or: Two, keep doubling down. And Joe Biden has to keep doubling down, because the minute he announces it was a mistake, guess who the hero of this story is? It is no longer Joe Biden, it is no longer Andrew Cuomo, it’s the evil, horrible, no-good, very-bad Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who took the exact opposite approach, and they can never allow that to happen.
I believe that Shapiro is right, in that there is a contingent of Democrats willing to mask and lockdown forever rather than admit Republicans were right. But I believe Shapiro overlooks the time honored gaslighting strategy, where the Biden Ministry of Truth solemnly announced that we’ve always been at war against mask mandates, and that a significant fraction of their mainstream media enablers will shamelessly parrot their new lie, just like Jen Paski shamelessly lied that it was Republicans that wanted to defund the police.
It won’t work for the vast majority of American voters, but they don’t really expect it to. It just gives them the delusional fig-leaf that they were never wrong, to be followed immediately followed by even more “shut up” and “you’re a racist,” then a nice foreign war or riots over a random dead black felon to help change the subject.
It’s the Democratic Party way.
Started working on a short post that became too long a post to finish today. So enjoy some video from Canada’s Trucker Revolution:
Instapundit also has an interesting article up: The workers of the world finally had an uprising and the left hates it.
So weâre finally seeing a genuine, bottom-up, working-class revolution. In Canada, and increasingly in the United States, truckers and others are refusing to follow government orders, telling the powerful that, in a popular lefty formulation, if thereâs no justice, thereâs no peace.
Naturally, the left hates it.
For more than a century, lefties have talked about such a revolt. But if you really paid attention, the actual role of the working class in their working-class revolution was not to call the shots â it was to do what it was told by the âintellectual vanguardâ of the left.
A working-class revolution led by the working class is the leftâs worst nightmare because the working class doesnât want what the left wants. The working class wants jobs, a stable economy, safe streets, low inflation, schools that teach things and a conservative, non-adventurous foreign policy that wonât get a lot of working-class people killed. Itâs not excited about gender fluidity, critical race theory, âmodern monetary theory,â foreign adventures and defunding police.
Worse yet, a huge part of the lefty self-image revolves around feeling superior to the working class and openly expressing disdain for it. One need spend only a few minutes tuning into left media like NPR, CNN or MSNBC to hear the disdain for working-class Americans, inhabitants of âflyover country,â people who live in the middle of nowhere.
So naturally, the idea that those people might be staging a revolution is intolerable.
The idea that the wrong kind of people might be demanding freedom is simply intolerable to the left.
Amazon is one of the great disruptive companies of the late 20th/early 21st century. Lots of technically savvy people in the early 1990s were wandering around thinking “The Internet is going to be huge, but how do you make money off it?” when Amazon (and eBay) went “Behold!” From selling books, then CDs, then everything, then locking in their customer base with not only a ginormous selection, but next day and/or free delivery, they not only out Walmarted Walmart, but also almost accidentally created the cloud computing boom with AWS, which for many years was their highest profit margin division.
But success is not without its discontents. Their search function has sucked forever, and sometimes it’s easier to find items via Google or DuckDuckGo. There’s tons of crap from China (tools and electronics) and India (soft goods) of uncertain quality.
And then there’s the problems covered in this video:
Today I got an email from Amazon (I bet many of you did too), stating “Try secure pickup when you order electronics.”
Reading between the lines, what I’m understanding here is that crime has gotten so bad in some areas (namely one-party Democrat-run locals with George Soros-baked DAs) that Amazon package theft is actually impacting their profitability. Remember all those train theft boxes scattered along California tracks?
Amazon is a modern wonder, but it relies on an affluent, law-abiding, high trust society to work properly. If law and order break down because thieves pay no price for stealing packages off your front porch, how does Amazon function? If no one charges and imprisons even the most brazen criminals, and (as in San Francisco and other Soros-DA infected locales) lawful violence to prevent theft is punished worse than theft, how long before those same thugs start prying and cutting open those new Amazon strong boxes?
Criminal disorder damages society at multiple levels, and under the Democratic Party’s current ideological direction, things are only going to get worse.
The Canadian trucker convoy protest against vaccine mandates continues to grow. Some videos:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has reportedly fled the capital:
While tyrannical #Trudeau hides in his bunker #ottowa #canada is out in support of #CanadaTruckers #TruckersForFreedom2022 pic.twitter.com/oyUVpftO6p
— Gillian McKeith (@GillianMcKeith) January 29, 2022
What kind of leader does this? And under pretence (Covid exposure)???? https://t.co/VWd8MK3ySb
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) January 29, 2022
— Defiant Lâs (@DefiantLs) January 29, 2022
Vaccine mandates are astonishingly unpopular with everyone but the ideological core members of leftwing ruling parties.
Rock musician Neil Young got a bee up his bonnet about Joe Rogan spreading Unapproved Thought, and told Spotify that they needed to either remove Rogan or remove his music. It wasn’t a hard choice.
Spotify has sided with its podcast superstar over Neil Young.
The legendary folk singer gave the streaming behemoth an ultimatum earlier this week, saying he refused to allow his music on the same platform as Joe Rogan. The âHeart of Goldâ singer accused Rogan and his podcast of spreading false information about COVID-19 vaccines.
Spotify reportedly paid more than $100 million deal to be the exclusive home of Roganâs show. Young, meanwhile, stands to lose 60% of his streaming income from his defiant stance, he said in a statement on his website.
âWe want all the worldâs music and audio content to be available to Spotify users,â a spokesperson for the company told the Wall Street Journal. âWith that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators.â
This is bunk. Spotify should have jack squat concern about safety for it’s listeners, at least beyond slapping a warning on lethal pranks like the Fork In the Electric Outlet Challenge.
Since the start of the pandemic, the spokesman noted, Spotify has removed more than 20,000 COVID-related podcast episodes. Still, Youngâs protests were not sufficient for it to drop its lucrative star talker.
âWe regret Neilâs decision to remove his music from Spotify, but hope to welcome him back soon,â the spokesperson added.
Roganâs podcast has attracted an estimated 11 million listeners.
Never mind the Lynyrd Skynyrd references, how little money most artists make out of streaming, or the irony of the “This Note’s For You” guy wanting to censor someone for not toting the government/big pharma line. If this was anything more than a publicity ploy (of the “Wait, you’re still alive?” type) on Young’s part, he’s badly overplayed his hand. But I want to talk about the oddity of Rock’s Eternal Now.
Because it was the music boomers grew up with, and it’s still on the radio and used in tons of movies, rock music of the 60s and 70s has stayed an active part of the culture much longer than the popular music of earlier eras did.
Neil Young had one only one number one hit, “Heart of Gold,” in April of 1972. That’s a few months shy of half a century ago. Go back half a century before that, to April of 1922, and this is the song that was topping the charts:
If people remember the name Fanny Brice at all today, it’s because Barbara Streisand played her in a movie in 1968 (which is to say more than half a century ago). How many rock musicians were listening to Fanny Brice songs in 1972? Approximate answer: None.
Which makes you wonder how many of today’s musicians are listening to Neil Young, a half-century after his heyday. I’m guessing more than Fanny Brice, but not many.
Just as we only know bits of the early 20th century songbook because they were featured on Looney Tunes (“Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal…”), it’s likely that any Neil Young listeners under the age of 50 or so only know of him from TV sound tracks or Jimmy Fallon imitating him. And most of his hardcore fans are not in Spotify’s demographic, since they already have the CDs they bought to replace the records and 8-tracks they bought in their youth.
One repeated line from “Heart of Gold” is “And I’m getting old.” So is the entire cohort of golden age Rock and Roll.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Last year, China banned skycrapers of more than 500 meters high, and put considerable restrictions on those more than 250 meters high.
Now comes word that they’re banning buildings over 150 meters high as well.
Larger cities will be limited to 250 metres â less than half the height of Chinaâs tallest buildings.
Now, special exemptions may still be given if a small city really needs a new skyscraper, but they absolutely, definitely cannot go above 250-metres.
Likewise, a bigger city could go higher than that if it has a convincing case, but if it wants to go over 500-metres then forget it. No more Shanghai Towers or Ping An Finance Centers â and thatâs final.
There are even new rules to follow past the 100-metre mark. To go higher than that a building will need to meet certain seismic performance and fire safety requirements.
Which sort of suggests that they didn’t have seismic performance and fire safety requirements before. Or maybe not adequate requirements. (Previously.)
Here’s the article in video form:
The usual subjects are touched on: The real estate market collapse, buildings so large there was no way all the space in them would ever be rented, Ghost Cities, etc. But the fact that the skyscraper boom got so far out of whack with economic reality is just another indication of how much of China’s “economic miracle” is a complete mirage.