In The Mailbox: 07.03.24 (Afternoon Edition)

Posted on | July 3, 2024 | 1 Comment

July 2, 1863: Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia conducts a disjointed attack against Meade’s entrenched Army of the Potomac. He succeeds in wrecking Sickles’ III Corps, which had foolishly taken a position in the Wheatfield and Peach Orchard forward of the main line, but does not break Meade’s lines. On Meade’s left flank, Hood’s division attempts to take the Little Round Top, but is finally driven off by Chamberlain’s 20th Maine, which, having run out of ammunition, conducts a bayonet charge. In the center, Anderson’s division reaches the crest of Cemetery Ridge, but a suicidal charge by Colvill’s 1st Minnesota buys time for reinforcements to drive Anderson off. Northwest of the main battle, newly-promoted Brigadier General George A. Custer’s cavalry division defeats Wade Hampton’s tired brigade at Hunterstown.
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

“Fix Bayonets!” Col. Joshua Chamberlain leads his 20th Maine into history at Little Round Top.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Self-Defense Appears To Be Legal In Alabama
EBL: Canada Day, SCOTUS, and Tan, Rested, Ready
Twitchy: Here’s CNN’s Pathetic & Lame Defense Of Media Taking So Long To Report On Biden’s Feebleness, After Months Of Gaslighting, Biden Finally Has A Plan To Tackle Grocery Prices, and HACK ALERT! David Frum Bemoans Collapse Of Democracy Despite “Full Employment” and “Rapidly Climbing Wages”
Louder With Crowder: Megan Rapinoe’s silence when confronted on support of allowing boys in girls’ sports speaks volumes, also, Orange man…good? Joe Biden (and his new cheap spray tan) attacks SCOTUS before he pulls this move
Vox Popoli: The Fourth Front, The Last Comics Publisher, AI Fraud and Fakery, and The USA Has Already Lost WWIII
Gab: Reclaiming Our Dignity – A Call For A Cultural Reawakening On The Right
Upstream Reviews: When The Gods Fell

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
CDR Salamander: The Most Essential Battle Of The Russo-Ukrainian War
Dana Loesch: Trump Wins At SCOTUS, Last Week In Legal – Cannon Fire Edition, “The Great Biden Coverup”,
Don Surber: Eagleton is Kamala’s hope
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – A Bobby Bonilla Hangover

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The Killer Angels
Bayonet! Forward: My Civil War Reminisences
The Last Full Measure: The Life & Death Of The 1st Minnesota Volunteers
Today’s Deals

Category: Linkagery

The Zuckerberg Conspiracy: How a 501(c)3 Funded the 2020 Election ‘Cabal’

Posted on | July 3, 2024 | 1 Comment

“The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency,” Glenn Reynolds wrote in December 2021. Nearly everyone now seems to agree about the “failed presidency” part of that headline, but is it too late to examine the nature of that “cabal”?

William Doyle at The Federalist has a must-read article:

Joe Biden’s unprecedented “basement” presidential campaign in 2020 and the chaotic election that followed represented a stunning repudiation of U.S. election norms as they have evolved over the last 250 years. The chaos involved a flurry of legally questionable and last-minute suspensions of existing election rules and an avalanche of unsupervised mail-in ballots in states that were not accustomed to their use. The election also brought the formerly obscure practice of “ballot harvesting” to the forefront of popular consciousness.
Amidst the chaos, one of the biggest questions remaining is how the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) — a sleepy, Chicago-based election and civic “engagement” nonprofit, armed with a staggering sum of more than $300 million from tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg — became one of the key 2020 election players. CTCL’s officers, promoters, and donors were among the “well-funded cabal of powerful people” who, as Time Magazine admitted in 2021, worked “behind the scenes” to “fortify” the 2020 election against Donald Trump.
Many Republican election watchers have long been scratching their heads, wondering if there is something that ties CTCL to something more nefarious than taking advantage of a legal gray area to help local election offices with “COVID-19 Response” during the 2020 election.
Our research revealed that, while election safety during Covid may have been the stated reason for CTCL’s program, this was not its purpose.
CTCL’s $332 million-plus election funding effort (also known as “Zuckbucks”) influenced election offices in critical Democrat areas in 2020 through large, “strings attached” CTCL grants. Ultimately, the evidence suggests that its purpose was to win the election for Joe Biden at the electoral margin in the swing states. . . .

You should read the whole thing, because the point Doyle is making is that (a) tax-exempt non-profits are prohibited by federal law from engaging in partisan political activity, and (b) the Zuckerberg-funded “cabal” had no other purpose except to guarantee Biden’s election. And they did this through a surprisingly simple method:

In the counties where CTCL made its 50 largest grants per capita, the average partisan lean in favor of Democrats was 33 points, which corresponds to a 67 percent Democrat to 33 percent Republican vote breakdown. What’s more, of CTCL’s 10 largest grants per capita, seven were given to key urban counties and cities in Georgia and Wisconsin. Biden narrowly won these two swing states in 2020 — by no more than 12,000 votes and 21,000 votes respectively.
In other words, the bulk of the money was spent in a sophisticated and novel effort to mobilize the mail-in ballots of specific voter profiles to benefit Democratic candidates, and the distribution of the largest CTCL grants ultimately increased Democrats’ partisan advantage in the electoral college.
As we found in our research, deep blue states with no chance of favoring Trump like Colorado and Vermont, as well as solid red states opposed to Biden like Tennessee and Utah, received very little CTCL funding — only around $0.10 per capita. However, swing states key to Joe Biden’s electoral college strategy like Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were lavished with tens of millions of dollars in CTCL money averaging between $1 and $2 per capita. Georgia, the top CTCL grant recipient, received a whopping $41 million — roughly $4 per capita — the lion’s share of which went to only seven deep blue metro Atlanta counties out of the state’s 159.

However angry you are about this, you’re not angry enough. What these Zuckerberg-funded non-profits did was prohibited by federal law, and nobody so far has been sent to prison for those crimes.

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Category: Election

When You’ve Lost Nate Silver …

Posted on | July 2, 2024 | 1 Comment

What? A Democrat telling “obvious lies that nobody but the dumbest partisans will buy”? You mean it’s a day ending in “-y”?

My friend Stephen Green is reveling in schadenfreude over Silver’s latest election forecast, which is developing a trendline in exactly one direction — from bad to worse for “Sundown Joe,” showing “Biden with just a 27.6% chance of winning the Electoral College and 44.2% odds of taking the popular vote.” As a Democrat, Silver is grief-stricken and angry about the situation, going through the “woulda coulda shoulda” second-guessing about the process by which his party’s establishment, after foisting upon the electorate the Oldest President Ever, then apparently decided there was no risk in attempting to extend his White House tenure another four years. Last week’s debate disaster should have been foreseen, because what’s the point of getting paid as a “campaign strategist” if you can’t anticipate potential problems?

Now, however, the same fools who led Democrats into that disaster are busy trying to convince their voters (and, perhaps more importantly, their donors) that they can somehow recover enough to win in November.

“It’s fundamentally a terrible idea to ask the public to make the guy they saw on Thursday president until he’s 86,” Silver says in his pay-walled newsletter, stating the blindingly obvious truth.

You’ve got to understand that Silver was one of those 20-something lefties who jumped into the political fray during the years when the Iraq War made George W. Bush very unpopular on college campuses. (One reason most conservatives my age roll our eyes at rhetorical symptoms of Trump Derangement Syndrome — the Hitler comparisons, etc. — is that it’s basically the same thing we heard about Dubya during the Bush Derangment Syndrome epidemic two decades ago.) Silver’s first big “win” as a forecaster, the foundation of his reputation as a polling expert, was in 2006, which in hindsight was the 21st-century’s high-water mark for Democrats. Silver predicted a big win for Democrats and he was right, and his winning streak continued two years later when Obama got elected. However, his accuracy since then has not been so stellar. In October 2010, Silver offered a “best guess” that Republicans would gain 48 House seats in the midterms; the GOP’s actual net gain in 2010 was 63 seats, the biggest net gain for House Republicans since 1938.

Generally speaking, when Democrats have a good year, Silver’s projections are more accurate than they are when Republicans have a good year. Silver has never overestimated Republican performance. So if Nate Silver’s numbers are telling him that Biden’s got barely a one-in-four chance of winning? That’s bad for Joe, because the reality of his situation is probably a lot worse than that. Others see the same thing.

Lloyd Doggett becomes first sitting
Democratic member of Congress
to call on Biden to withdraw
Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas on Tuesday became the first sitting Democratic member of Congress to call on President Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, a huge moment for the Democratic Party as Doggett says publicly what many elected officials had been speculating about privately.
“I represent the heart of a congressional district once represented by Lyndon Johnson. Under very different circumstances, he made the painful decision to withdraw,” Doggett said in his statement. “President Biden should do the same.”
Doggett’s statement magnifies the pressure surrounding the president and his team, who have been trying to tamp down party concerns in the wake of Biden’s disappointing debate performance against former President Donald Trump last week.
In calling on Biden to step aside, Doggett said the president could help usher in a new generation of leadership to help the party achieve its ultimate goal: defeating Trump.
“Recognizing that, unlike Trump, President Biden’s first commitment has always been to our country, not himself, I am hopeful that he will make the painful and difficult decision to withdraw,” Doggett said. “I respectfully call on him to do so.”

That’s the first pebble rolling downhill in what may soon become an avalanche and there’s really no “win” possible for Democrats. Either they stick with the dementia patient whose feebleness has now been exposed on national TV — a bell that cannot be unrung — or else they do some kind of smoke-filled room arrangement to dump Biden and replace him with another candidate, thus nullifying the Democratic primaries.

Utterly devastating. Biden isn't even remotely close in any of the swing states. https://t.co/84MPwzAtDp

— Joe Concha (@JoeConchaTV) July 1, 2024

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Category: Election, Joe Biden, Polls

In The Mailbox: 07.02.24 (Morning Edition)

Posted on | July 2, 2024 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 07.02.24 (Morning Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Thanks to everyone who bought stuff through my Amazon links in June.
Yesterday was the 161st anniversary of the most important cavalry action in American history.
Silicon Valley et Hamas delenda sunt.

The legendary SPI monstergame

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Concealed Carry In Chicago
EBL: Biden Playing Golf, also, Snap Elections Did Not Work Out So Well For Macron!
Twitchy: Randi Weingarten Faceplants Trying To Show Support For The Biden-Harris Campaign, Sacre Bleu! You’ve Booked A Vacation Home Just As France Votes For The “Fascists”, and MSNBC’s Kyle Griffin Plays Stupid Games & Wins Stupid Prizes
Louder With Crowder: Texas SCOTUS stands up for children, bans “gender-affirming” “care” for minors, also, They sent Nancy Pelosi out to defend Biden’s cognitive ability, she lacked the cognitive ability to do so
Vox Popoli: Joe Must Go, Atheists Discover Consequences, The Clowntardery of Color Revolutions, Macron Raus, and Che Cosa?
L’Ombre de L’Olivier: The Gaslighting Will Continue Until It Leaks And Explodes,
Postcards From Barsoom: Meritocratic Racial Quotas As A Universally Disagreeable Compromise,
Defending The Wood Perilous: Wheels Within Wheels With Eyes

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Dana Loesch: President Biden’s Alternate Reality, also, Jill Biden’s Vogue Cover,
Don Surber: Trump Court Rolls On
Glenn Reynolds: Chevron, The Supreme Court, And The Law,
STUMP: Actuaries Longevity Illustrator – Refreshed!, Rhode Island COLAs – Increasing Expenses For Underfunded Plans, Happy Bobby Bonilla Day 2024!

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Stars In Their Courses: The Gettysburg Campaign
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Category: Linkagery

In Defense of Cynicism

Posted on | July 1, 2024 | 3 Comments

Antisthenes

“The cynics aren’t always right. But that’s the way to bet,” Professor Glenn Reynolds says, in regard to a young journalist’s belated discovery that an infamous “hate crime” was not what he’d been told.

There is an unfortunate shortage of Cynicism among the young nowadays. Their idealistic conceptions of “social justice” make them automatic suckers for every “cause” that comes along, e.g.:

Further proof of the BLM movement’s essential bogusness was the fact that, once Joe Biden was installed as president, the protests ended. Black suspects are still getting shot by cops, but the national news media has ceased covering these incidents, because that was never really what it was about. It was about electing Democrats, period, and having succeeded at that goal, the media has moved on from BLM.
“Demand Justice for [Fill-in-the-Blank]” memes are now gathering dust back in the Instagram archives of liberals too stupid to wonder what the 2020 season of “activism” was really about. Never once has a liberal asked the cynical question, “Cui bono?” Who benefited from all that “activism”? Whose interests were served? Who got rich from those months of media-fueled outrage?

Have you heard of Linzell Parhm? He got shot to death by cops in Fort Wayne, Indiana, last month. Linzell’s family has retained the services of Ben Crump, whose legal practice seems to consist primarily of shaking down municipalities for “wrongful death” settlements. It isn’t clear that Linzell’s death was “wrongful,” considering that he had an AK-47-style Draco next to him in the car and the cop ordered him at gunpoint, “Keep your hands on the f—ing dash. If you reach down there again I will shoot you, motherf—er.” I don’t know about you, but if a cop drew his pistol and told me to keep my hands “on the f—ing dash,” my hands would be on the f—ing dash. Apparently this wasn’t how Linzell Parhm was taught to react to such situations, but he’s not here to argue in defense of his own approach to the situation, is he? But I digress . . .

My point is that Fort Wayne hasn’t been burnt to the ground, and nobody’s rioting over the death of Linzell Parhm, despite the fact that he’s just as dead as St. George of the Blessed Fentanyl. All that “social justice” uproar in 2020 was about one thing and one thing only, electing Joe Biden, and his campaign strategists apparently don’t think having nationwide race riots this summer would advance their chances of getting Biden reelected, so major national news organizations don’t give a damn about some idiot getting himself shot by the Fort Wayne PD.

In fact, to get back to Professor Reynold’s point about cynicism, I rather doubt that anybody in the media ever gave a damn about George Floyd. All they cared about was helping Democrats win an election, which is why they incited those “fiery but mostly peaceful” riots.

Merriam-Webster defines cynic as “one who believes that human conduct is motivated wholly by self-interest,” which strikes me as rather too narrow a definition. More generally, cynicism is about doubting those who claim to act from purely altruistic motives. Cynicism is about not being a chump. If you think the “journalists” at CNN are motivated by a noble desire to “speak truth to power,” blah blah blah, then you are the kind of sucker who never deserves an even break.

Do you believe Jake Tapper and Jim Acosta are better people — more virtuous, more honest, more intelligent — than you are? Are you morally and intellectually inferior to them? Then why would you content yourself to be tutored by them, to have them lecture you about “democracy,” as if you were an ignorant fifth-grader? It’s not just that they are “Democratic operatives with bylines” (although they definitely are that), but rather that they think the rest of us are too stupid to see through their scam, and I don’t know about you, but I take kindly to such insults.

By the way, do you know Antithenes is? Did seeing him at the top of this post arouse your curiosity to such an extent that you Googled his name to discover that this disciple of Socrates is regarded as the founder of Cynicism as a philosophy? In just a few minutes of reading, I learned more about Antithenes and Cynicism than 99% of people know, because fewer than 1% of people give a damn about ancient philosophers and their arguments. The reason I acquired this half-hour’s worth of expertise on the subject is because if I’m going to write about something, I certainly don’t want to write something wrong about it. Wikipedia says that the original Cynics “rejected all conventional desires for wealth, power, glory, social recognition, conformity, and worldly possessions and even flouted such conventions openly and derisively in public.” So, in its original meaning, a Cynic was a sort of ascetic non-conformist who rejected common social values. Elsewhere, Wikipedia tells us, the contemporary meaning of cynicism — “an attitude characterized by a general distrust of the motives of others” — arose in the 1800s from an “emphasis on the ascetic ideals” that led to a critique of contemporary society as falling short of such ideals. So now you know as much as I know on the subject which, as previously mentioned, makes you more knowledgeable than 99% of people, probably including Jake Tapper and Jim Acosta.

Am I a philanthropist, with a mission to enlighten humanity? No, I’m just a guy who doesn’t want to look stupid by writing something wrong, because that would damage my credibility, which is my stock in trade. Having disavowed any unselfish motive for my own actions, why should I imagine that other people are more altruistic than me?

“Thou shalt not be a chump” is not listed among the Ten Commandments, but I consider it a basic duty of any journalist. So, when I followed the link from Insty’s blog, I found this article by Ben Kawaller about the Matthew Shepard murder, with an introduction from Free Press editor Bari Weiss:

Ben — like me and so many others — grew up believing in the story of Matthew Shepard and what his murder meant about America. Or at least certain parts of the country.
But then, a few years ago, Ben heard another narrative. It caused him to wonder: Was the story we heard true?

My first reaction to this confession that Weiss and Kawaller “grew up believing” in the media-manufactured myth of Matthew Shepard as a martyr for gay rights was, “Wow, I’m old.” Because I was an adult — a 39-year-old assistant nation editor at The Washington Times — at the time of Shepard’s murder and, to be honest, 1998 doesn’t seem like ancient history to me. So the idea that there are now adult journalists who “grew up” during that time I so well remember — well, it makes me feel like an antique. But I never bought the martyr-myth of Matthew Shepard.

Amid the media hysteria over the case, I was reading everything that came across the wires and it seemed to me that what had happened was something akin to the central story of In Cold Blood, namely that two small-time criminals had upped their game to murder and thereby managed to commit a murder that became a nationally known atrocity. It wasn’t the police saying that Shepard’s killers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, were motivated by homophobia; that interpretation was being imposed on the story by activists, media and politicians. McKinney and Henderson had prior arrests for drugs and burglary; this college kid from back East made the mistake of getting mixed up with these local hoodlums, and that was basically the story.

About a year after the murder, a liberal writer named JoAnn Wypijewski wrote an article about the case that included details which, if you were reading carefully, seemed to undercut the “hate crime” motif. Wypijewski reported, for example, that McKinney and Henderson were on a five-day meth binge at the time of the murder. Try hanging around meth-heads in the midst of a binge, and you could get murdered, too. Unfortunately, that article seemed not to make a dent in the martyr-myth of Matthew Shepard, which had sprung up more or less instantaneously in October 1998. It was not until 2013 that Stephen Jimenez published a book debunking the “hate crime” angle (see, “The Sorelian Myth of Matthew Shepard: Petty Criminals and Liberal Media Bias,” Sept. 25, 2013):

By making people believe in politically crafted falsehoods, media propagandists seek to inspire action — “to make a difference” — and so the record of the media’s past failures (Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, Dan Rather, et al.) is carefully suppressed.
The one thing the news media will never do is to confess their own lack of credibility, to expose their own errors and biases. So when it turns out that what the media promoted as an anti-gay “hate crime” was, in fact, the act of two petty criminals in the throes of a five-day meth binge, this is a truth that the media will ignore, because it is a truth that exposes the media itself as untrustworthy.

We need more cynicism in America, not less. And however much you hate the media, you don’t hate them as much they deserve to be hated.

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Category: Intellectuals

A Substack About Nothing

Posted on | July 1, 2024 | 1 Comment

Finally decided to try my hand at it:

A few months ago there was a lot of noise about an alleged Nazi problem on Substack. Certainly it is not the case Substack is pro-Nazi, but they are anti-censorship, and this distinction was apparently impossible for some self-described “progressives” to comprehend:

“Substack’s leaders … proudly disdain the content-moderation methods that other platforms employ … to limit the spread of racist or bigoted speech. An informal search of the Substack website … turns up scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack—many of them apparently started in the past year. These are, to be sure, a tiny fraction of the newsletters … But to overlook white-nationalist newsletters on Substack as marginal or harmless would be a mistake.” . . .

We’re living in a 21st-century Salem, and the folks who want to hang witches all claim to be “progressive.” Basically anybody who votes Republican nowadays is suspected of witchcraft — “white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi”! — and whatever actual danger there may be from such extremism is obscured by the hysterical paranoia of self-appointed witch-hunters like Casey Newton.
If everybody is a Nazi, nobody is Nazi. If you start exaggerating the extent of extremism by expanding the definition to include anyone you disagree with, don’t pretend that your diminished credibility is anyone’s fault but your own. . . .

You can and should read the whole thing, which is 3,600 words long, but I figured if I was going to introduce myself to a new readership, the introduction should be thorough. By the way, I start out by explaining why my Substack newsletter is not yet monetized, so you can sign up for free, which I urge you to do, because eventually maybe it will be about more than nothing, and therefore worth paying to read.

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Category: Journalism

Rule 5 Sunday: Cheesecake Armor & Other Delights

Posted on | July 1, 2024 | 2 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho

One of the longstanding arguments in fantasy tabletop roleplaying is the actual worth of chainmail bikinis. Are they actually useful in combat, or just there to provide eye candy? Perhaps the most famous example is the armor of Robert E. Howard’s sword-swinging heroine Red Sonja, which adorns hundreds of comic book and paperback covers. On the other hand, we have more “realistic” armor, here depicted on Barghest from Fate/Grand Order (yes, her boobs are actually that big under the armor) and some home-made scale armor from that_girl_with_the_hearse on Instagram. Here we have a young lady checking her gear before heading out for a day in the woods terrorizing the goblins and kobolds.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.

All armored up with no place to go?

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule Five Terms You Shouldn’t Use Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: Saturday Night Girls With Guns, Will Joe Go?, MAGA Debate Night, The Battleship Potemkin – The Odessa Steps, Superfreak Down Under, Ride of the Valkyries, Elia Adams – Canadian Flasher, Beer Drinking For Clean Water, Milk Shaming, Brats, and Below Deck.

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: April in June, Fish Pic Friday – Sharkfit Natalie, Maryland, My Maryland, Tattoo Thursday, Maryland, Virginia Fight Over Crabs, The Wednesday Wetness, Tuesday Tanlines, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Random Celebrity News, Heat Wave and Sunday Sunrise

FLAPPR: T.I.T.S. for June 28

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Category: Rule 5

FMJRA 2.0: One Big Crunch

Posted on | June 30, 2024 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

A tough week for my Senators, who lost two of three to Pete’s Brewers and then did the same against the Giants. Yeah, some of them were close losses, but an L is an L, and nobody cares about the point spread except the bookies. We’re still in fourth place at 41-49, just two games ahead of the cellar-dwelling A’s and five behind the Twins.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley et Hamas delendam sunt.