Academic research on police shootings and race – The Washington Post
looking out for #1 – and that ain’t you
Clinton thinks that distributing money financed by government debt, and redistributing tax money to entitlement beneficiaries and government spending targets, are preferable to allowing citizens to choose how best to spend their own money, and avoiding government debt altogether.
That’s because in the citizen-self-directed model, Clinton is superfluous.
In the name of doing good, Clinton and the Left are all about creating roles for themselves. To be sure, they probably want to do good as well, but if they weren’t getting rich and powerful in the deal, they’d do something else.
Interestingly, the only roles they seem to know how to create are ones that involve dictating other people’s behavior.
They seem to have no idea about how to create and run a sustainable market enterprise that makes a net addition of value to the economy, provides paying jobs, and succeeds solely from the voluntary cooperation, without coercion, of all parties in the exchange.
But they have no problem telling everyone else in the country how to live.
In the land of the free and the home of the brave, why do so many people fall for the Left’s confidence scheme? None of the Left’s excuses for socialist mechanisms hold up under the slightest scrutiny.
The tip off for me is how quickly the Left get upset and start to freak out when questioned about their methods. It tells me that on some level that they won’t face, they fear how wrong they are.
Denver, Cleveland, here they come….
A protest leader talks about "militant tactics" & "self-defense" to shut down "Nazi recruitment rally" @ABC10 pic.twitter.com/fpIcIKrz1X
— Frances Wang (@ABC10Frances) June 26, 2016
…in the name of compassion, of course.
“Often contradictory in his views on atheism and religion, Rousseau nevertheless was certain of one thing: that the State should be the final arbiter of the human condition, in the name of something he called the General Will. Only the State, he thought, could make postlapsarian man well again. One can practically smell the fascism coming off his pages, all in the name of compassion, of course. No wonder his more perceptive contemporaries, including Voltaire, considered him a monster.
Many others, however, were greatly influenced by him, including most of the great monsters of the twentieth century. Without Rousseau, Marx is unthinkable; without Marx, Lenin is unthinkable; without Lenin, Stalin is unthinkable, without Stalin, Mao is unthinkable; without Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot are unthinkable.”
Michael Walsh, “The Devil’s Pleasure Palace,” 2015, p. 137-8.
Benghazi After All These Years
Posted by Stilton Jarlsberg at his excellent blog – Hope n’ Change Cartoons
“As much as we’d like this to be a truly definitive commentary about Hillary’s testimony at the Benghazi hearing, at the time of this writing there are still hours to go…so we’ll just have to do the best we can.
In a nutshell, Hillary has been doing a fine job of being imperious, calm, and inhumanly disinterested in the deaths she has accepted “responsibility” (but not blame) for. Much like Jack the Ripper, you have to at least give her credit for being skilled at her craft.
Elijah Cummings, the ranking (emphasis on “rank”) Democrat on the committee has spent the day covering Hillary’s ass like a pair of overstretched panties from Lane Bryant, actually going so far as to pronounce the entire committee a political construct with no other purpose than to hurt Hillary’s chances to become president. It is worth noting that Cummings knows for a fact that this isn’t true, essentially giving him the same culpability (albeit after the fact) as the terrorists who burned our embassy and murdered American citizens.
As for Hillary, she seemed unbothered by the revelations that on the night of the attack she sent an email to Chelsea saying that it was a planned attack from Al Qaeda affiliates, and the next day she had a phone call with the Egyptian prime minister in which she explicitly stated that the attack had nothing to do with any Youtube video.
Days later, of course, she trotted out the Youtube video story while speaking in front of the coffins of our dead…she shared it with the families who had lost their sons…Susan Rice took the lie to the Sunday news shoes…and then Barack Obama took the completely fictitious story to the United Nations, where he disparaged America’s freedom of speech, and declared that “the future must not belong to those who would slander Islam.”
All lies.
And all to cover Hillary’s hiney for her complete ineptitude in office, and to cover Barry’s ass for his ludicrous campaign claim (damn near his ONLY campaign claim) that “GM is alive, Bin Laden is dead, and Al Qaeda is on the run.”
So – is the media exploding over these revelations? They are not. It’s relatively safe to say that the media gives not a single damn, very few care about the truth on the Republican side, and no one cares about the truth on the Democratic side except to the extent that they want to hide it.
So as long as Hillary looks calm and composed while lying (which, we should note, sociopaths find remarkably easy) it seems likely that she’ll sail through this hearing and be that much closer to being nominated to run for president.
And should our nation be unfortunate enough (but perhaps deserving enough) to see her win that high office, we can only pray that her personal security will be no greater than that of Ambassador Chris Stevens.”
GasHoax
Rubio on Obama’s Assault on Israel
the community of astroturfers
Sharyl Attkisson, author of Stonewalled, provided a rich paradigm for deconstructing propaganda on her blog yesterday. It wraps up the Elbert County United Front of Leftists – the Prairie Sunny Truthy Plainsy Birdy bunch – in a succinct unified theory that de-cloaks much of their collective bovine scat.
Top 10 Astroturfers
“What’s most successful when it appears to be something it’s not? Astroturf. As in fake grassroots.
The many ways that corporations, special interests and political interests of all stripes exploit media and the Internet to perpetuate astroturf is ever-expanding. Surreptitious astroturf methods are now more important to these interests than traditional lobbying of Congress. There’s an entire PR industry built around it in Washington.
Below are the top ten astroturfers as viewed by respondents in an informal, non-scientific survey.*
TOP 10 ASTROTURFERS
1. Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America and Everytown
2. Media Matters for America
3. University of California Hastings Professor Dorit Rubenstein Reiss and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Dr. Paul Offit
4. “Science” Blogs such as: Skeptic.com, Skepchick.org, Scienceblogs.com (Respectful Insolence), Popsci.com and SkepticalRaptors.com
5. Mother Jones
6. Salon.com and Vox.com
7. White House press briefings and press secretary Josh Earnest
8. Daily Kos and The Huffington Post
9. CNN, NBC, New York Times, Politico and Talking Points Memo (TPM)
10. MSNBC, Slate.com, Los Angeles Times and Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times, MSNBC and Jon Stewart.
Astroturfers often disguise themselves and publish blogs, write letters to the editor, produce ads, start non-profits, establish Facebook and Twitter accounts, edit Wikipedia pages or simply post comments online to try to fool you into thinking an independent or grassroots movement is speaking. They use their partners in blogs and in the news media in an attempt to lend an air of legitimacy or impartiality to their efforts.
Astroturf’s biggest accomplishment is when it crosses over into semi-trusted news organizations that unquestioningly cite or copy it.
The whole point of astroturf is to try to convince you there’s widespread support for or against an agenda when there’s not.
The language of astroturfers and propagandists include trademark inflammatory terms such as: anti, nutty, quack, crank, pseudo-science, debunking, conspiracy theory, deniers and junk science. Sometimes astroturfers claim to “debunk myths” that aren’t myths at all. They declare debates over that aren’t over. They claim that “everybody agrees” when everyone doesn’t agree. They aim to make you think you’re an outlier when you’re not.
Astroturfers and propagandists tend to attack and controversialize the news organizations, personalities and people surrounding an issue rather than sticking to the facts. They try to censor and silence topics and speakers rather than engage them. And most of all, they reserve all their expressed skepticism for those who expose wrongdoing rather than the wrongdoers. In other words, instead of questioning authority, they question those who question authority.
Much of this sounds familiar to many Americans. The results of an informal, non-scientific poll identify groups related to Gun Safety Action Fund, Inc. as top Astroturf efforts. These groups include Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, Everytown, Everytown for Gun Safety, Gun Sense, It’s Time for Gun Sense in America, Gun Sense Voter, I’m a Gun Sense Voter, Moms Take the Hill and Stroller Jam.
The groups present themselves as grassroots organizations of “mayors, moms survivors and everyday Americans.” They are spearheaded by former New York Mayor and multi-billionaire Michael Bloomberg, and former PR professional and mother Shannon Watts. Last year, they announced a $50 million political campaign to try to counter the efforts of the formidable gun rights lobby.
Second to the gun control groups in being identified as a top disseminator of astroturf and propaganda is the controversial, left wing blog Media Matters for America with the stated goal of waging “guerrilla warfare and sabotage” against FOX News. More broadly, Media Matters acts on behalf of the interests of Hillary Clinton and the Obama Administration, sometimes in direct consultation with Obama officials. It was founded by the troubled Democratic political operative David Brock, who formed the super-Political Action Committee (PAC) American Bridge that raised funds to help elect liberal Democrats to Congress. Brock also served on the board of the super-PAC Priorities USA, which announced support for Hillary Clinton’s potential run for president.
A close third is an array of blogs that use words such as “science” and “skeptic” in their titles or propaganda in an attempt to portray an image of neutrality and logic when they are often fighting established science and serving pro-pharmaceutical industry agendas. These include: ScienceBlogs.com (using the pseudonym “Orac”); vaccine inventor Dr. Paul Offit of The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who earned an undisclosed fortune from Merck pharmaceuticals; and his apparent replacement in trolling blogs Dorit Rubenstein Reiss. She is a law professor at the University of California Hastings and a frequent contributor to SkepticalRaptors.com.
A final category frequently mentioned is quasi-news organizations that sometimes throw readers off the astroturf trail because they publish some legitimate news-type or pop-culture stories, but mix in propaganda or astroturf. These sources tend to be highly-cited by the unquestioning traditional news media either to advance an agenda, or in the media’s attempt to be hip and edgy or “get clicks.”
Sometimes, astroturf is in the eye of the beholder. But no matter how you see it, there is no short supply.”
pick a little talk a little cheep cheep cheep
Bird Brains of a feather
Pick a little talk a little cheep cheep cheep talk a lot pick a little more
“Saying anything to push their agenda”
The glaring misrepresentation that the evidently buzzed hive-mind of Elbert County leftists who will “say anything to push their agenda,” used to justify their latest assault on Elbert County conservative voters, is that BOCC officials represent a “very small minority of Elbert County voters.”
In the left’s Merlinesque reverse reality, the winners of BOCC elections don’t actually represent the majority of voters. Enter the appointed leftist leaders of Elbert County – career bureaucrats who insinuate themselves into citizen advisory committees to represent “grass roots involvement” without harmful [non-leftist] “ideologies.” And the more of these “imminently qualified” self-serving public-servants we have to control the free citizens of Elbert County, the better.
But how come these obviously qualified leftist individuals never win an election? That’s easy. We, the voters, are all stupid – so stupid we don’t even understand basic words like hypocrisy.
Thank goodness local leftists exist to abjectly demonstrate how hypocrisy works – how election losers are really winners, how a minority of leftists really represent a majority of grass roots voters, and how self-anointed government-obsessed totalitarians are really the voice of Elbert County people.
Perhaps leftist “grass” roots hypocrites should lay off the grass before presuming to dictate more truth to Colorado.
(as) If
The hubris shown by the New Plains Democrats who changed their web site domain to Truth Colorado blows my mind.
Truth – an objective concept – can only potentially mean something as an observation by other people. And even then the concept requires substantiation. Truth, subjectively announced about oneself, amounts to the puffing of carnival barkers and snake oil salesmen.
Content from the new truth site is no different than that of the old plains site with its maundering innuendo against anyone not liberal, and long-winded leftist positions on various agenda projects.
The local loopy left have gone far beyond the point of reasonable forbearance. The harm they steadfastly continue to inflict on this community is expensive. Preventing an economy from developing – promoting the impoverishment of a population – holding out regulatory strangulation and job prevention with one hand while promoting social services with the other – these should be chargeable offenses.
And they shamelessly call themselves the truth.
They don’t deserve this place.
If—
(‘Brother Square-Toes’—Rewards and Fairies)
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
How it’s done
In may 2011, the Obama White House chooses Schultz, to be paid with your tax dollars, to handle press on Fast and Furious.
Our relationship is courteous enough. As far as I’m concerned, it largely consists of Schultz trying to discredit those who could harm the administration, and advancing story lines and ideas to help his boss. He seems to have a pretty well-organized network of support. For example, Schultz might suggest to his media contacts that they do a story dissecting controversies in Issa’s background. It could be an editorial or blog written by party loyalists, an article penned by a like-minded reporter, or a favorable piece in the left-wing propaganda blog Media Matters. Schultz then circulates the resulting “story” to the rest of us in the media, sprinkled with his commentary. The strategy counts on the tendency of many bloggers and reporters to copy and codify each other’s work. If things go according to plan, the story is regurgitated and excerpted by so many outlets that it appears, to the uninitiated, to be prevailing thought. It’s self-fulfilling and self-legitimizing. Pretty soon, the theme bleeds into real news organizations and the cycle is complete. The message being delivered, of course, is that there’s no real story behind Fast and Furious. Just a Republican vendetta.
. . .
It’s a propaganda campaign to divert from the damaging facts: controversialize critics to try to turn the focus on personalities instead of the evidence.
Sharyl Attkisson, Stonewalled, 2014, pp. 107-108.
To write, publish, blog, or facebook ideas contrary to the zeitgeist of Leftist orthodoxy is to routinely endure all manner of insult and ad hominem from the reverse barometers of truth and justice trying to saturate “prevailing thought” with their politics.
If the people taking down society are against you, however, one has to treat such attacks as compliments.
Yellow Journalism
Dems for Dorman
to be or not to be
It would be so easy to just become a progressive – to join the chorus of Leftists all quoting the same bad science, the same dead end economics, the same top heavy political and labor groupthink that follows leadership in lock step without dissent. What a simpler existence! You take all of the messy bits of reality that don’t fit the progressive agenda, and just forget about the lot of it. Who cares if it means ignoring that pesky scientific method with its difficult cause-and-effect that requires evidence to found a conclusion. What a royal pain. Forget all that stuff. They don’t use it anyway.
The planet is not warming up. Peak energy gets freshly refuted every month. Top down dictatorship, whether its religious or political spectacularly fails like clockwork every time it’s tried. Human creativity and invention just ruin the rationing/postcarbon/degrowth agenda. But none of it matters to progressives. All of it just rolls off their backs like water off a mallard.
Inside the climate controlled atmosphere of progressive armor, the weather is fine. The days are pleasant, not too hot or cold. And when dissonant ideas attempt to penetrate the ramparts, a ready made script of rules for radicals, like leukocytes to a wound, closes the breach, and obviates the necessity for further thought.
You almost have to admire the simplicity of a system capable of a-priori refutation of all competing ideas without ever having to actually construct a cogent counter argument. And the substitution of physical force for intellectual reason is a stroke of brilliance. Might is right. Who knew? Who would’ve thought that a group could actually succeed on brute force alone! I mean, most groups in history who gained power through force and suppression at least paid lip service to some novel idea. But not progressives!
Ideas just gum things up and get in the way of their experiencing the quiet contemplation of pure power. Best not to break stride. Just keep marching. Keep chanting. Keep demonstrating. Keep shouting. Keep fighting. Cause harm, and if necessary, kill. The willingness to kill gives them all the edge they need. Barbarity works.
History contains many lessons for winning strategies that don’t require intellectual honesty, provable science, fairness, justice, or moral approval. The progressives learned to get their way by walking through the opposition, not around them. And it doesn’t matter what the opposition is saying. Just shut them up, shut them down, ignore them, ridicule them, stomp them, and march on.
The pleasant weather around the well insulated powerful progressive is worth protecting. It is its own reward – a tautological compact of self-referential and self-reinforcing happiness that will not be disturbed.
And just look at what you have to look forward to if you don’t join them. Those who don’t join the progressive movement are an enemy to be crushed. They get to receive every indignation and insult known to man on a daily basis. They get to have all of their reasonable world view, proven in science, demonstrated in unrevised history to maximize real human progress and wealth, ridiculed as insanity.
So this is why I say maybe it would just be easier to join them. Take the blue pill and get with their program because the real world is full of nasty progressives who don’t want you messing with their matrix.
low bidders
free speech at Elbert County public meetings
Yesterday, in a review of the recent meeting held by Commissioner Schlegel with representatives from Elbert County water districts, Bill Thomas wrote that “no public comment” was permitted, “even though it was a public meeting.”
He repeated his objection later in the piece where he said, “He [Commissioner Schlegel] did not allow questions or comments from the spectators, even though it was, in his words, ‘a public meeting.'”
Lastly, Thomas referred to the meeting as an “Open/Closed Meeting of the Water Districts,” implying that because local Leftist spectators at the meeting asked to speak and weren’t given the floor, the meeting was “open/closed” – presumably a pejorative characterization.
The Colorado Sunshine Law requires that meetings between public officials be open to the public. No requirements in state law exist for public officials to conduct forums for public speech during their public meetings.
The 1st Am. guarantees the Left a virtually unlimited right to present their ideas to the public through various publication venues, just as it does everyone else. Leftists in Elbert County generally use that right to dump on and disparage everything non-Leftists do. But there is no 1st Am. guarantee for individuals to input their free speech into meetings of public officials.
Characterizing an open meeting of public officials as tainted because Leftists were not given an opportunity to make their opposed positions heard in the meeting is simply gratuitous whining.
If Leftists put more energy into developing and publishing creative solutions to the challenges that public officials are tasked to lead, public officials might welcome their comments at public meetings.
But everyone knows what the Elbert County Left is going to say before they open their mouths. It’ll be mudballs, character assassination, impossible environmentalism, and hyperbolic images of their fantasy fears. Their cases are never realistic, just terribly frightful.
Bill Thomas is a good reporter and I appreciate his diligence. But it’s rare that he doesn’t also include a few tips of the iceberg of his Leftist agenda. Perhaps Mike Phillips requires that everyone he publishes on New Plains must also throw in some feints to the Left, an agenda tax if you will.
But the New Prairie Plains Times crowd is fiddling while Rome burns – and it’s not about the petty stuff they like to complain about – like how many miles get logged to company [county] cars, or which commissioner didn’t use his magical xray vision to foresee a water pipe break at the old courthouse, or how the Colorado Sunshine Law is really supposed to provide an open forum for the Left to hijack every meeting of public officials.
Renewable water is the holy grail of sought-after solutions in Colorado. An awareness of this problem is probably coded into the DNA of everyone born here. And considering how much rain falls throughout the state, the market can solve this problem provided people, acting in commercial organizations, are allowed to aggregate demand into economic units, and buy and sell water properties to satisfy that demand.
That’s exactly what markets do – they efficiently and fairly allocate scarce resources.
But oh wait. The Left doesn’t trust markets. The Left trusts dissent, utopian visions, social justice, and progress toward the agrarian villages of Tolkein’s Shire. The Left distrusts economic growth, technology, production, and capital accumulation. Despite hundreds of years of material advances in the quality of life throughout the world enabled by allowing individuals to accumulate capital and leverage their property in markets, Leftists persist in the erroneous belief that they can plan a better society.
After every one of the Left’s utopian experiments has increased oppression, suffering and even mass death in some cases, you’d think it would give them pause. You’d think.
Evidently the Elbert County Left have decided that renewable water in Elbert County threatens their utopia, just like oil & gas, industry, a job base for local citizens, and non-utopian elected officials do.
But the poverty and lack of opportunity we live with in this planned economic backwater they want to preserve won’t go away under the terms of the status quo. We must embrace progress in the form of real economic growth if we’re to have any chance at long-term viability in Elbert County.
Elbert County commissioners have correctly perceived the challenge and appear to be doing what they can, which involves removing the obstacle of local government and allowing the private sector to grow the economy.
This apparently frightens the Left. It shouldn’t. They stand to benefit despite themselves.
birds of a feather
independent, adj. 1. Not subject to the control or influence of another. 2. Not associated with another (often larger) entity. 3. Not dependent or contingent on something else.
dependent, n. 1. One who relies on another for support; one not able to exist or sustain oneself without the power or aid of someone else.