Quotes of note:

[Crafty_Dog]

"Amazing how the septuagenarians and octogenarians in the Democrat party are willing to break faith on a decades-long commitment to the security of Israel because a bunch of know-nothing college kids and chuckleheaded academics have joined with a small foreign contingent in the party -- many of whom can't even vote -- to mau-mau them into obedience."

My understanding is the larger factor is the substantial arab/muslim vote in Michigan, Minnesota, and New Jersey.

[Body-by-Guinness]

"Amazing how the septuagenarians and octogenarians in the Democrat party are willing to break faith on a decades-long commitment to the security of Israel because a bunch of know-nothing college kids and chuckleheaded academics have joined with a small foreign contingent in the party -- many of whom can't even vote -- to mau-mau them into obedience."

My understanding is the larger factor is the substantial arab/muslim vote in Michigan, Minnesota, and New Jersey.

Perhaps for Biden and those who count electoral college votes for him, but congress’s concerns are far more parochial and hence far more likely to be impacted by the local Mau-Maus.

[Body-by-Guinness]

Matt Taibbi was asked “why doesn’t he pay much attention to the sins (or threats) from “the right”?”

He gave a great answer:

Why I don’t spend a lot of time on the Republicans:

1) There is a enormous army of MSM reporters already going after them from every angle, with most major news organizations little more than proxies for the DNC, to the point where stations hire Biden spokespeople as anchors;

2) The Republicans have very little institutional power nationally. It’s not their point of view prevailing in schools, on campuses, in newsrooms (where over 90% of working reporters vote blue), and especially in the intelligence and military apparatus, which has openly aligned itself with Democrats. Even if Donald Trump were a “threat to Democracy” he lacks the institutional pull to do much damage, which can’t be said of Democrats;

3) The Democrats’ ambitions are significantly more dangerous than those of the Republicans. From digital surveillance to censorship to making Intel and enforcement agencies central players in domestic governance — all plans being executed globally as well as in our one country — they are thinking on a much bigger and more dangerous scale than Republicans. I lived in third world countries and the endless criminal indictments of people like Trump and ongoing lawfare efforts to prevent even third party challenges are classic authoritarian symptoms. The Republicans aren’t near this kind of capability;

4) Last and most important, the Democrats are being organized around a more potent but also much dumber, more cultlike ideology. People like Yuval Harari and his Transhumanist “divinity” concept scare me a lot more than the Rs, and I was once undercover in an apocalyptic church in Texas. Ask your average Russian or Cuban what overempowered pseudo-intellectuals are capable of.

I have a pretty good record of picking dangerous phenomena ahead of time. I feel confident on this one, and that’s before we get to the demographic/class shifts in the parties.

Full piece here:

https://legalinsurrection.com/2024/03/matt-taibbi-was-asked-why-doesnt-he-pay-much-attention-to-the-sins-or-threats-from-the-right/?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=matt-taibbi-was-asked-why-doesnt-he-pay-much-attention-to-the-sins-or-threats-from-the-right

[Body-by-Guinness]

Samizdata quote of the day – the toppling of the woke authoritarians

Wokeism. Climate extremism. Kindly authoritarianism. This is now the operating system of Western, ‘centrist’ politics. Take Joe Biden, America’s somnambulant president. At the 2020 election, even anti-woke liberals insisted this scion of the old Democratic establishment – a man so old he can’t even be slurred as a Boomer (he’s actually Silent Generation) – was the man to return America to normality, before the BLM riots and MAGA mania. ‘If you hate wokeness, you should vote for Joe Biden’, declared a piece in the Atlantic, arguing that Trump is to the culture war what kerosene is to a dumpster fire, fueling the woke extremes. That take has aged like milk. On his first day in office, Biden signed sweeping Executive Orders on ‘racial equity’ and gender ideology. He later tried to apportion Covid relief on the basis of race. He’s a Net Zero zealot. He has allowed the justice system to be weaponised against his opponents. He invited Dylan Mulvaney to the White House, FFS. Biden’s return to ‘normalcy’ has been so successful millions of Americans are starting to wonder if Donald Trump might actually be the saner choice.

https://www.samizdata.net/2024/05/samizdata-quote-of-the-day-the-toppling-of-the-woke-authoritarians/

[Body-by-Guinness]

“…you can’t long remain a free society if you don’t believe in freedom. And it’s no good just saying you believe in it: you have to live it. Sometimes that means politicians deciding ‘we would rather live with this injustice or this social problem than expand the state to deal with it.’ When was the last time you heard anyone say that? And that’s the problem.”

– David Frost, Daily Telegraph (£)

[Body-by-Guinness]

This is the part of the 1953 sci-fi movie where the scientists figure out the high voltage lines & atom bombs only make the monster bigger.

David Burg/iowahawk

[Body-by-Guinness]

Scott Adams

Democrats solved Trump’s biggest political problems.
They proved the legal system can completely control him. No dictator risk.
They proved there is no secret MAGA army waiting to be activated. (You would have heard from them by now.)
And best of all, they generated massive empathy for Trump. “If they can do it to me…” is powerful.
Trump’s campaign funding is solved.
Republican animal spirits have never been higher.
This is the biggest political mistake in American history.

BBG here: If Biden or his handlers understood what they unleashed they’d pardon Trump, state indeed the courts should not be used to decide elections, and vow to henceforth advocate for the Democratic Party to take the high moral road (with their fingers crossed behind their backs, of course). Fortunately “Progressive” stalwarts would have collective kittens before committing sepbuku at a White House gate were that to occur, so no worries there.

[Body-by-Guinness]

"Our universities are becoming bastions of unfreedom, if my few young academic friends are to be believed, and we are raising up a generation of secular ayatollahs."

Theodore Dalrymple

[Body-by-Guinness]

For Those Keeping Score

By CHARLES C. W. COOKE

June 27, 2024 12:32 PM

If I’m understanding correctly, the overarching message of the last two weeks has been that Donald Trump is set to become a dictator if he wins in November, but that, in spite of this, it’s just awful that the Supreme Court won’t let the executive branch run its own trials or impose criminal penalties without Congress, and it’s just great that the executive branch remains able to strip constitutional rights without due process and bully Facebook into moderating as it sees fit.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/for-those-keeping-score/

[Body-by-Guinness]

@RevolverNewsUSA

Remarkable monologue from David Sacks:

"The Democratic party is a collection of interests who want to remain in power. The Democratic Party is the party of government. Its goal is to allocate money and power from the government to the collection of interests who back the Democratic Party. In other words, it's basically a collection of interests who want to loot the Republic.
Well obviously, no one's going to vote for that. So they have to make it about something else. They choose a figurehead, they talk about how this is about saving democracy. They basically invent, hoax after hoax, lie after lie to basically maintain their power.
And I think what's happened is, the mask has come off, the whole shell game has been revealed. It's obvious that Biden was always a puppet for these interests who were hiding behind him. And now, it's all being exposed."

[ccp]

"always a puppet for these interests who were hiding behind him."

or he hiding behind them?   

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.stevestewartwilliams.com/p/top-10-thomas-sowell-quotes

[Body-by-Guinness]

Frank J. Fleming
@IMAO_

The way Trump is remaining completely silent while the Democrats self-destruct is kinda scary; it's like that scene in Jurassic Park where the velociraptor uses the door handle.

[Crafty_Dog]

 

[Body-by-Guinness]

I’ve some quibbles here, but have little doubt many of the pathological political processes currently on full display have, at their root, the desire to be seen favorably, particularly when a politician’s ego is in play:

A conclusion is hard to escape: America suffers from an incompetent leadership class. Its problem isn’t ruthlessness but softness, its inability to deal with the world without a media that constantly lies to make it feel better about itself.

– Holman W Jenkins, Jnr.

[Body-by-Guinness]

@jason_meister
If we just oust Joe Biden, disenfranchise millions of voters, imprison Donald Trump, abuse the FISA court, weaponize the justice system, rig primaries, remove names from ballots, raid the private residence of a former president with deadly force, shutoff surveillance cameras, fabricate evidence, gag, censor, eliminate the Electoral College, expand the Supreme Court, ban Voter ID, deny Sercret Service resources,  and flood the country with tens of millions of illegals we could save democracy.

[Crafty_Dog]

Pithy.

ZANG.

[Body-by-Guinness]

RNC Research
@RNCResearch
·
10m
"I cured the economy."
— Joe Biden (six days ago before the current market crash)

[Body-by-Guinness]

And I’d add they seek to gaslight and demoralize you every step along the way. Don’t fall for it:

The System creates Democrat presidential “candidates” out of thin air.

They run ghosts.

Then they install them.  They did it in 2008, 2020 and they’re doing it again now.

2016 was an aberration - they were caught flat-footed by Trump’s powerful appeal and vowed never again.

This is a war against the System, its ghosts and the illusion of “democracy” - all used to move us into tyranny.

If you don’t get this by now - if you’re not willing to fight this war - you’re going to be roadkill.

88 days to save America.

FOCUS.

Clarice Feldman

[Body-by-Guinness]

I think much of this also applies to climate alarmism, too:

Kevin Bass PhD MS
@kevinnbass

I'm saying all of this as someone who used to be a leftist: Left-wing political positions are the projection of leftist psychological needs. Challenging them on rational grounds gets you canceled because there is no way to directly challenge someone's psychological integrity without provoking a severe, negative reaction. The misinformation research field is essentially one big project dedicated to protecting and legitimating the integrity of leftist psychopathological projections. That is why leftists are so obsessed with misinformation. Leftists are terrified about misinformation in the same way that small children are terrified about not going to sleep in complete darkness, i.e. in always having a night light on. To leftists, right-wing views are not just wrong: they are terrible monsters that threaten to destroy the leftists' entire construction of psychological meaning and reality itself. "Misinformation" is simply a very sanitized and scientized way to characterize the abject horror that leftists feel when they hear right-wing interpretations of the world. They use the word "misinformation" to hide their visceral, primordial horror at right-wing views, to give their horror the veneer of respectability. But they betray their real feelings in how they propose to act on misinformation: they want to destroy the First Amendment, they want to prevent these views from being expressed to anyone, and as Hillary Clinton recently recommended, they want to imprison people who express these views. This is a position that someone takes who is experiencing an intense psychological reaction at differences of opinion, and that is what these leftists are experiencing when they hear us express our views. I know because until last year, I was a leftist. Leftists literally become deranged when they have to listen to right-wingers, because their views are required for the maintenance of their psychological integrity. Like one, big, mass cult religion. That's what leftism is today in America. All of their behavior follows from that.

Here's the scary part: leftists now control the institutions and want to impose these same views and this same psychological orientation on everyone else. Their mission is now to implement a mass, universally accepted cult in this country, in the same way that the Catholic Church once sought and nearly succeeded to make everyone in Europe a Christian. Leftists want to make the world Left in the same way that Catholics wanted to make the world Christian. Leftists will fight against heterodoxy with the same tenacity that Catholics once burned heretics, and leftists now have nearly the power they need to do so.

https://x.com/kevinnbass/status/1836400345318146143

[Body-by-Guinness]

2nd post:

J.K. Rowling

An infallible recipe for poor mental health and lifelong unhappiness is believing that unless the entire world validates your self-perception, it hates you. If you move through life telling yourself that unless you can force other people to play along you'll 'be 'erased', if the slightest hint that another person doesn't see you the way you've labelled yourself feels like an attack on your very existence, your life will be spent in a state of miserable insecurity and fragility.

Would I like to 'let go' of my femininity? Willingly; femininity is the set of stereotypes imposed on women by men. Would it 'make me feel like dying'? Of course it wouldn't.

Vulnerable young people are being harmed by your kind of hyperbolic language, which promotes the lie about the inevitability of suicide among the gender-questioning unless they're given often irreversible medical interventions. Rhetoric like this flies in the face of everything we know about mitigating suicide risk among those with mental health issues and it's particularly gruesome when done by self-congratulatory people on Twitter whose banner picture is 'be kind'.

[Body-by-Guinness]

Blackwell Smith
20h  ·
I got stuck in South Carolina this weekend. I got news for y’all a cashless society will fall apart without electricity. It gets weird fast. Hotels couldn’t even give me room. They couldn’t even make keys or check the reservation I made online. At the exact time when people needed them the most. I will never leave town without cash. I have a new respect for preppers. They aren’t crazy they are prepared.

[Crafty_Dog]

This makes me realize I need to have a decent amount of cash stashed in the truck.

[DougMacG]

This makes me realize I need to have a decent amount of cash stashed in the truck.

Large, medium and small bills for exact change.

[Body-by-Guinness]

This makes me realize I need to have a decent amount of cash stashed in the truck.

Large, medium and small bills for exact change.

While ammunition makes for fine trade goods, if you like investing in metals....

[Crafty_Dog]

George Shultz, secretary of state under President Reagan, did get it, and he explained it succinctly: “Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table.”

[ccp]

While ammunition makes for fine trade goods, if you like investing in metals..

I recently sold my old silver nickels dimes quarters and halves and dollars when silver was 22 to 23 .  I started, like everyone else pulling these out of circulation 1965 when I was eight.

So held in a tool box for 59 yrs.  I knew that would be the time to buy as silver is now over 30.  I should have told everyone here to buy!   

OTOH it was only 5 to 6 K worth of stuff.

If only I was older and had money I would have been going to banks and hoarding up in the 60s.  Would have done like others - go to Vegas and gather as many silver dollars as I could fit in a rental truck 

[Body-by-Guinness]

BELMONT CLUB: Excellence in the Service of Mediocrity. “The problem of controlling Elon is an example of the dilemma of mediocrity controlling talent. How can Kamala Harris, who, according to Senator Ted Budd, has not connected a single person to the internet ‘using the $42.45 billion allocated for the BEAD program,’ meaningfully supervise a man whose Starlink satellite constellation had 4 million users worldwide? It would be like putting the Detroit Public Schools in charge of Albert Einstein.”

[Body-by-Guinness]

Jeffery Tucker on Harris:

I've paid far more attention to Kamala than I ever imagined I would with a presidential candidate, listening to her interviews, speeches, and so on.

I suspect that many people, even people who are her partisans, are realizing something quite shocking. It's this: she knows less about policy, news, existing public controversies, and even recent history, than most people who read X or NYT or even just listen to the news on radio or TV. For that matter, I suspect that just about any person on the street knows more.

It's like she hasn't really paid much attention to anything for years. Interviewers are trying their best to be kind to her, but even the slightest bit of push on what she knows turns up a big nothing. It's not that she is being cagey or clever. The trouble is that she truly does not know.

It's hard to understand why. It could be that she has, for most of her career, been able to outsource knowledge and understanding to others. She has always just been a smiling face, the socializer, the spouter of bromides, and gotten by with faking it. After a while, it probably doesn't feel like faking; it feels like this is the way the job is supposed to be. She has not known any other way.

Now she is expected to play the part of someone who knows some minimum something about a range of issues, and she simply cannot deal with it. What's remarkable is that her champions are as mortified by this as anyone.

[Crafty_Dog]

Well said.

[Body-by-Guinness]

“I fear that Harris is every bit as vacuous behind the scenes as she seems to be on the public stage. I fear she will be tested early by a foreign adversary and stumble badly, whether it's in stopping Iran from building a nuclear weapon or China from blockading Taiwan or Russia from seizing a portion of a Baltic country. I fear she will capitulate too easily to her party's left flank, especially when it comes to identity politics, economic policy or polarizing cultural issues. I fear she'll have no domestic policy ideas that don't involve mindlessly expanding the role of government. I fear she'll surround herself with mediocre advisers, like her embarrassingly bad veep pick. I fear she won't muster the political will to curb mass migration. And I fear that a failed Harris presidency will do more to turbocharge the far right in this country than to diminish it.”

[Body-by-Guinness]

@scottadamssays

I saw a clips today in which an MSNBC propagandist was asking how likely it was that five generals would lie about what Trump allegedly said behind closed doors.

Well...

51 Intel professionals lied about Hunter's laptop.

Hundreds of government and media pros lied about Russian Collusion

Thousands of government and media pros lied about the Fine People Hoax (and dozens of other Trump hoaxes).

Millions of medical professionals lied during the pandemic.

Millions of scientists are lying about the reliability of climate models.

Five lying generals isn't even a stretch.

[DougMacG]

@scottadamssays

I saw a clips today in which an MSNBC propagandist was asking how likely it was that five generals would lie about what Trump allegedly said behind closed doors.

Well...

51 Intel professionals lied about Hunter's laptop.

Hundreds of government and media pros lied about Russian Collusion

Thousands of government and media pros lied about the Fine People Hoax (and dozens of other Trump hoaxes).

Millions of medical professionals lied during the pandemic.

Millions of scientists are lying about the reliability of climate models.

Five lying generals isn't even a stretch.

Well done!

[Body-by-Guinness]

“Some 35 years after the collapse of the 20th century’s most rigorous experiment in the failure of central planning, the fall of the Soviet empire, and comparative success of the capitalist West, it is hard to fathom how we’ve got into this climate communist mess. It should be self-evident that the planet doesn’t have a thermostat, let alone one easily adjusted by national leaders ordering technology to improve through a cascade of plans lashed to a target. Decarbonisation will happen regardless and is likely to go faster by inventing better solutions funded from the proceeds from growth, or bottom-up innovation. Rather than five-year battery-powered tractor plans, in the context of mission-led state direction – the latest reinvention of the language of failure by top-down socialist planners.”

– Andy Mayer.