Posts Tagged ‘Palantir’

LinkSwarm for August 28, 2020

Friday, August 28th, 2020

Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! The Republican National Convention finishes up and more news of those “fiery but peaceful” riots.

  • Here’s President Donald Trump’s full nomination acceptance speech from the RNC:

  • The PJ Media crew live-blogged night four of the RNC. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Victor Davis Hanson on what the riots are really about:

    As with most cultural revolutions that wish to start things over at “year zero,” the violence is aimed at America’s past in order to change its present and future.

    The targets are not just the old majority culture but also classical statues and buildings, hallowed institutions, religious icons, the renowned names of streets and plazas, and almost every representation of tradition and authority.

    For the majority of Americans who do not buy into the revolution, it all seems so surreal — and hypocritical.

    Only a despised, dynamic American economy allows millions to divorce from it for a summer of protest.

    A ridiculed U.S. Constitution ensures that looters and arsonists have due process.

    The Bill of Rights guarantees peaceful assembly and electrically amplified profanity rarely protected elsewhere.

    Affirmative action; federally ensured and subsidized college grants and loans; and cheap smartphones, headphones and laptops all give youth choices unimagined in the past.

    No matter — cultural revolutions are incoherent and nihilist.

    Those who signed up for the Jacobin Reign of Terror wanted violence, not a constitutional republic to replace the French monarchy.

    The Bolsheviks were less interested in substituting an elected prime minister for the Russian czar than in grabbling power and murdering millions of their enemies.

    Mao Zedong did not just hate the warlords, landlords, Mandarins and Nationalists. He wished to reinvent 1 billion Chinese in his own narcissistic image by first killing millions.

    There is, of course, reason to oversee the police more effectively.

    Universities are partly culpable for a collective $1.4 trillion in student loan debt.

    Globalization eroded the middle class. Inner-city America is far too violent — and far too neglected.

    But these are not the apparent concerns of those who carry off shoes and phones in U-Hauls, kick the unconscious on the pavement, destroy art and sculpture, or seek to torch public buildings with public servants inside.

    The point of the mob is to wipe out what it cannot create.

    It topples what it can neither match nor even comprehend.

    It would erode the very system that ensures it singular freedom, leisure and historic affluence.

    The brand of the anarchist is not logic but envy-driven power: to take it, to keep it, and to use it against purported enemies — which would otherwise be impossible in times of calm or through the ballot box.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “There’s little wrong with President Trump that more Trump couldn’t solve.”

    More fundamentally: where do you think the country would be without him? Even if you’re disappointed with less than 200 miles of wall, remember that leading Democrats not only insist that every single new inch is a moral atrocity, they want to tear down sections that already exist.

    Think the trade agenda is progressing too slowly? Well, President Trump already renegotiated two of our worst trade deals. How many new, bad ones do you think a Hillary administration would have signed by now? Trump not tough enough on China for you? A little too much talk about his “good friend” Xi Jinping? I sympathize. But he’s still done more than all the last four presidents combined. More than that, he’s reversed the China policy of the last four presidents combined. Have you heard how Joe Biden kowtows to China?

    And I know that some will insist that, so long as a single American soldier, sailor, airman, or marine is deployed anywhere in the Middle East, then Trump has failed—or worse, betrayed them. But in fact, the president has mostly succeeded at the tasks he promised for that region: defeating ISIS, revitalizing our alliances while requiring more from our allies, and prudently disengaging from existing conflicts while not starting any new ones.

    All of these trends, changes, policies, and initiatives, and many others—however incomplete—would be reversed in the event of a Trump loss. The ruling class would hail the president’s defeat as a historic repudiation of his (allegedly) “racist and xenophobic” vision, etc., as a vindication of every charge and complaint they’ve made against him and his supporters since Day 1. Their goal would be to erase the last four years and the 2016 election as if they never happened. If think-tank conservatives want above all to get into a DeLorean and go back to 1985, the ruling class wants to cram America into a Prius and force us back to 2015. And then resume the trajectory the country had been on back then, i.e., the road to woke managerial tyranny.

  • Password is: “Enthusiasm Gap,” with six times as many CSPAN viewers for the RNC than the DNC. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • President Trump’s poll numbers rise in swing states. Adjust by the usual 3% polls historically favor Democrats over election results, and Trump is tied or ahead in all of them. And that was before the RNC. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Another look at the rioting in Kenosha.
  • Video of Kyle Rittenhouse exercising his right of self-defense:

  • Reporter robbed at gunpoint during riot.
  • Newspeak from CNN: “Fiery but peaceful protests.” At this point, all of us should just start pelting CNN reporters with garbage.
  • CNN’s inadvertent open mic:

  • “CNN Hires This Is Fine Dog To Report On Riots.”
  • Sadly true:

  • This is how cities die: “Shaken by summer looting in affluent neighborhoods, some Chicagoans are moving away.”
  • Jerry Seinfeld tries to refute that New York City is dead piece, but it just amounts to “New York is awesome and we’re tough” yadda yadda, and doesn’t address the insanely high taxes or actually changes in economic justification that used to make living in the city a requirement that isn’t there anymore. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Powerline has additional thoughts on that New York Times article mentioned yesterday that shows that, amazingly, riots, looting and arson aren’t popular with average Americans.
  • Baltimore Sun slams Maryland Republican congressional candidate Kimberly Klacik for blaming Baltimore’s dysfunction on Democrats. They said that was “ludicrous and overly simple,” which I guess is a synonym for “true.”
  • “The Post Office Conspiracy Is First Class Stupidity“:

    If you believe the mainstream media, Donald Trump is involved in a nefarious scheme to somehow make the USPS into something inefficient and incompetent, which comes close on the heels of his plot to make the sun start setting in the West. If that’s his plan, he already pulled it off decades before he first hit the cover of the New York Post. We conservatives think the president has done a lot of great stuff since humiliating Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit in 2016, but not even the most hardcore Trump Train engineer would go as far as Trump’s frothy pie-holed critics and credit the president with the mastery of time and space.

    The correspondence conspiracy is pretty much liberal Q, except the eccentric Q folks at least like America.

    And here’s a special shout-out to the Democrats pushing this intellectual fentanyl for deciding it is a good idea to choose the competence of the post office as their hill for the crusty crustacean’s campaign to die on. Please, continue pointing to the USPS as an example of what you’ll make the entire government into if we’re dumb enough to elect Gropey J. Good thinking, because if there’s anything that real people outside the MSNBCNN bubble love, it’s the post office. It’s the federal DMV, except with stamps.

    Snip.

    What is clear is that the real goal of this conspiracy theory is to launch a preemptive attempt to find another excuse for a Democrat defeat. Last time it was PUTIN PUTIN PUTIN and this time it’ll be POSTAGE POSTAGE POSTAGE.

    Apparently, his plan is to somehow make it so the post office will be unable to deliver vote by mail ballots in order to prevent Democrats from winning the election that their senile old weirdo nominee is in the process of blowing. It might be interesting to examine the details of this conspiracy theory if there was even a coherent conspiracy theory to examine, but there’s not. It’s mostly “Trump bad!,” then low and undecipherable mumbling, then “And that’s how he will steal the election!”

    The specifics of the alleged plot, to the extent you can identify them, are puzzling and elusive. What exactly is Trump going to do again? Is he going to order the mailmen to toss ballots in the shredder? Seems like it would be hard to pull off that flex with all those crack journalists out there. We are also told that he is rounding-up blue mailboxes from America’s street corners, and that this has been going on for a couple of decades is only further proof of his evil plan, somehow. What is not clear is how this might work in practice – so, the idea is that the Democrat voter comes home, ballot in hand, weeping because there are no blue mailboxes anymore to place his ballot into, and then he walks back inside his house past … his own mailbox? And then he just gives up? He sits at his dinner table, head in hands, sobbing at his inability to figure out how to drop a piece of correspondence into the postal system?

  • “New Jersey Election Invalidated Because of Mail-In Voter Fraud.”
  • Related: “Man Arrested in L.A. for Voting 3 Times as His Dead Mother.
  • Good news! Yaser Abdel Said, the man accused of murdering his own two daughters in an Islamic honor killing, has finally been apprehended after a 12 year manhunt.
  • Texas Democrats sue to keep the Green Party off the ballot in November. Remember: When Democrats say they support equal ballot access, they don’t really mean it.
  • University of Arizona stops a Wuhan coronavirus outbreak before it starts.
  • Interesting data on how UK Labour Party has become markedly unpopular in ever-younger age groups:

  • President Trump to the press:

  • Reporter: Why are the NBA’s ratings down? Expert: Woke politics and China. Reporter: Do you have any idea? Expert: Woke politics and China. Any idea at all? Expert: WOKE POLITICS AND CHINA! Reporter: 😑.
  • Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp has has had enough of Social Justice Warriors in Silicon Valley.
  • Dwight has a four part video series on The Falkland Islands War up.
  • Speaking of Dwight, he might appreciate these annotated lyrics to the C.W. McCall song “Convoy,” since we recently watched the movie of the same name. (Brief review of the movie: Deeply flawed but weirdly compelling.)
  • Captain Kirk brings the fire:

  • “Arkham Board of Health Feedback On Miskatonic University’s Draft Plan for a Safe Campus Reopening.”
  • “Did Democrats Sacrifice Several Goats To Satan At The DNC? Fact Check: FALSE. They Actually Sacrificed Just One Goat.”
  • “Facebook Now Allows Users To Flag Anything They Disagree With As ‘Literally Hitler.”‘
  • Speaking of Facebook, everyone hates their new interface. Me included.