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Secrecy Is for Losers What Biden’s classified document scandal reveals about power in America: Jacob Siegel

Posted By on January 22nd, 2023

http://Secrecy Is for Losers What Biden’s classified document scandal reveals about power in America

Secrecy—the first refuge of incompetents—must be at a bare minimum in a democratic society, for a fully informed public is the basis of self-government.
– From a 1960 report by the Committee on Government Operations, U.S. House of Representatives.

On Wednesday morning, Jamie Lee Curtis was trending on Twitter. Earlier in the week, the actress had posted a photo on Instagram showing off the handsome set of black Pollock chairs that furnish her office. It was not the chairs, however, that landed her on Twitter’s front page, but the photograph on the wall behind them. The Instagram photo has since been deleted, after thousands of amateur investigators online tweeted at Curtis to ask why there was a photo of a naked child stuffed into a suitcase hanging on her office wall.

Here was a clue pointing to Curtis’ involvement in the globalist pedophile ring known to dominate the political and cultural elite of the United States along with who knows how many other Western nations. This particular conspiracy theory, which has branches in Pizzagate and QAnon, has two great strengths. First, it can’t be disproved by contrary evidence. To take one example, the image on Curtis’ wall does not, in fact, show a child’s body crammed into a suitcase. The photo, taken by the artist Betsy Schneider, is of a young girl in a tub of water. Creepy it may be, but bad taste and ritualistic child sacrifice are not necessarily the same.

The conspiracy’s other source of strength is its basis in reality. Jeffrey Epstein really was enticing some of the world’s richest and most powerful people to a private island where he kept a harem that included underage girls trafficked into the sexual service of a global elite. Yet Epstein’s arrest, rather than dragging his horrible crimes out into the light of day, only deepened their mystery. For one thing, his well-timed suicide in a New York prison put an end to the chance that he might spill his secrets. But the secrecy remains as the FBI stonewalls requests to release files related to Epstein’s work as a Bureau source.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Anything Goes, Wearily HBO’s new documentary series, Sex Diaries, reminds us that, for the most part, television still wants to be trash. Jonathan Clarke

Posted By on January 21st, 2023

https://www.city-journal.org/hbo-sex-diaries-is-a-cynical-misfire

The emergence of the visionary and provocative television of the 1990s and 2000s, the period that gave us The Sopranos, The Wire, and The Larry Sanders Show, owed a great deal to HBO, whose narrowcast distribution model and welcome appetite for risk helped make such programming possible. More recently, the premium network has found distinction with Show Me A Hero, True Detective, and Chernobyl. Sex Diaries, however, HBO’s new series of 30-minute documentaries about the sex lives of Brooklyn hipsters on the make, is a much more cynical enterprise.

Sex Diaries is derived from a popular New York magazine column of the same name, which ran from 2007 to 2013. Anonymous New Yorkers wrote in to describe their sexual activity (or lack of same) in a given week; columnist Rachel Kramer Bussel, a former NYU Law student and the editor of sex-themed anthologies like Big Book of Orgasms, Vol. 2 and Crowded House: Threesome and Group Sex Erotica, curated and edited the submissions. Kramer Bussel aimed to capture a representative sample of New Yorkers, both gay and straight, from the very sexually active to the more solitary, from vanilla to kink. Inevitably, the television series leans more heavily into less mainstream lifestyles, from polyamory to latex fetishism to trans sex. What provided a frisson a mere decade ago now seems tame, even banal.

The show is bad—extraordinarily bad, in fact, both hollow in conception and, unusually for HBO, badly made—but there is always plenty of bad television to go around. What irks is that HBO is trying to pass off this trash as avant garde. Is it brave and provocative in 2023 to show people engaging in threesomes or in leather bondage, or using Tindr or Grindr to find the assignations that will briefly shore up their sense of self? At the leading edge of opinion in a large U.S. city, the really brave thing would be to suggest that we should impose some limits on our desires. Who besides church leaders is willing to come out in favor of sexual continence and fidelity to a partner? Who would dare to suggest that someone who has sex with many nameless partners is putting their soul at risk? Most of us would much rather be derided as libertines than risk looking like a square.

The series’ first subject, “James,” a British-born female bartender, is rarely clothed, and she looks exceptionally good naked. This was a promising start. And yet, by the episode’s seventh minute—I made a note—I was losing interest, because there’s simply nothing else going on. The producers have no interest in letting us know who James is, aside from her being an exhibitionist.

Episode three gives us a very overweight black woman living in Coney Island. She’s engaged in polyamorous relationships with people she meets out of town. She acknowledges that sex is more fraught for her because of her race and her body size. Something interesting is beginning here—she is trying to tell us something about her inner life—and then the camera just moves on.

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No Signs of Light in the West Christopher Akehurst

Posted By on January 21st, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2023/01/no-signs-of-light-in-the-west/

It is nice to start the new year with some expression of hope. Will this be a better year than last? Well, we can always dream, but all the indications are that it will be worse. The malign forces that are undermining Western society remain in the ascendant and are getting stronger.

Yet life is never without consolations, and it is an unusual privilege to witness the declining days of a dying civilisation. It doesn’t happen often in history. It is happening now, to us. Too pessimistic, you think? Well, consider the evidence.

Take the current pandemic of idiocy. We are in the grip of idiocy; you encounter it everywhere, from the ravings of climate lunatics about the world getting uninhabitably hot to the denials of biological reality by gender cranks, to the manufactured lies that pass as education, to the delusion that the senile President Biden is some sort of leader. No government or individual has the capacity to suffocate this nonsense.

How do we explain the slide from rationality to idiotic fantasy? Could it be that in the intellectual civil wars of the 1960s and after we have marginalised the intelligent elite who once guided our society? Certainly, “elite” has acquired a pejorative meaning, especially in education where it has been replaced with the pursuit of “equality of outcome”, for which, of course, it was necessary that standards be lowered. The dislike of “elitism” showed itself in all sorts of ways. In Australia for instance no longer was it considered necessary to try to speak correct English. “Strine” and “Aussie English” were the new norm, promoted on the ABC and elsewhere with propaganda about one accent being as good as another and not being ashamed of the way we spoke. Simultaneously formality, which takes some effort to maintain, was progressively discarded every­where, from Government House to what you wore to a restaurant. Public institutions and utilities replaced their Latin mottos and coats of arms with infantile logos and meaningless utterances such as “bringing you world-class service”, the excellence boasted of being invariably in inverse proportion to the quality of the product supplied. Across the Western world, the lowest common denominator—the tastes and preferences of “the common man” whose century it was said to be by an American vice-president—dethroned a striving for excellence. Indeed, the concept of excellence was abolished in favour of cultural relativity. There is no evidence that this state of affairs is changing for the better.

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The World Economic Forum: Making the World Safe for Autocracy Their great reset is nothing but a regressive autocratic agenda to reinstitute feudalism. Why would free people cede their liberty and prosperity to this self-anointed new nobility? By Thaddeus G. McCotter

Posted By on January 21st, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/20/the-world-economic-forum-making-the-world-safe-for-autocracy/

Churning out carbon emissions to fly in on their corporate jets to Davos, Switzerland, for their annual fête to make the world safe for autocracy, the World Economic Forum’s hypocrisy is once again patent:

Greenpeace accused attendees of ‘ecological hypocrisy’ before asking just why the WEF claims it is committed to the global goal of keeping warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) when the emissions generated from all the private jets flying in and out of airports serving Davos last year were equivalent to those produced by about 350,000 average cars for a week.

Despite the calumnies by that nest of right-wing loons, Greenpeace, the WEF’s hypocrisy is only exceeded by its elitism. Consider the following from the U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Change, billionaire John Kerry: “[It is] extraordinary that we select human beings . . . are able to sit in a room and come together and actually talk about saving the planet.”

What makes them “select” and gets them into that room is that they are rich and powerful. How they got that way varies from those who inherited it, married into it (like Kerry), or earned it by providing a good and/or service the masses purchased. Like thinking placing a book under your pillow as you sleep will help you cram for an exam, these elitists believe their ability to acquire money (one way or another) mystically translates into expertise in other fields of human endeavor, ones which must be fertilized by their presumed omnipotence—the climate change apocalypse, disinformation, immigration, etc.

So, too, there are invited attendees who are not necessarily wealthy, such as journalists and politicians (though nowadays many of them qualify for the “one percent”), and sundry courtiers. These invitees leap at the opportunity to attend, hoping to parlay the invite into career and monetary advancement; and relishing the sense of vicarious elitism accorded by their economic betters deigning to acknowledge their existence. It is deemed impolitic to note that the attendance of  these lesser lights is only suffered because they are deemed useful idiots.

What these elitists and their useful idiots are after, unadorned by nicety, is seen in this John Kerry quote: “money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money.” 

Money from whom, you might ask? You. Again, Kerry:

We don’t have time, folks, to be cobbling together bespoke deals here, there and everywhere. We have to do it on a massive basis and the key to that one is philanthropy. It’s not the only key, we need governments to put Federal public money into it.

You see, the rich are tired of footing the bill to peddle apocalyptic conspiracy theories that can scare the peons senseless enough to throw away their liberty and prosperity to make the world safe for autocracy.

ISRAEL, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Israel-haters Also Glorify Cop Killers By Civis Americanus

Posted By on January 21st, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/israelhaters_also_glorify_cop_killers.html

The extreme political Left talks quite about “intersectional struggles,” including the racist intersectionality that equates African-Americans who were once forced to sit in the back of the bus and drink from separate-but-unequal water fountains (the one for Caucasians had a chiller, the one for Black people did not) to Palestinian terrorists who murder children and Olympic athletes, and fire rockets into cities while using their own people as human shields. It’s just so woke to equate American citizens of color to the absolute dregs of the human species, isn’t it?

The only intersectional struggle is the one between the world’s civilized people and its depraved violent savages who still cling to the Dark Age mentality that the only way to improve one’s situation is to steal from others and destroy whatever is left. Savage is as savage does, and technological advancement does not necessarily equate to civilization. Nazi Germany was very advanced technologically, and so were the USSR and Imperial Japan. This did not stop them from committing monstrous crimes against humanity throughout Europe and Asia. Communist China now uses advanced electronic surveillance methods to oppress its own people. The intersectional struggle includes that of Israel versus Hamas and other terrorists, Ukraine against Russia, and Taiwan against communist China.

There is however yet another intersectionality, and that is denial of the right of Israel to exist with advocacy of the murder of American law enforcement professionals. I wonder how Americans who are somewhat receptive to the propaganda of the “Justice in Palestine crowd” will feel that they learn that the same camp glorifies cop-killing domestic terrorists.

Black Lives Matter’s Support for Cop Killers

Black Lives Matter’s anti-Semitic denial of the right of Israel to exist is well known, and so is its support for convicted cop killer Joanne Chesimard, whom BLM calls “Mama Assata.” Here is BLM praising not only the murderous dictator Fidel Castro but also (alleged until proven guilty, but also fugitives from justice) domestic terrorists “Brother Michael Finney Ralph Goodwin, and Charles Hill.” These individuals allegedly murdered a New Mexico police officer, carjacked a tow truck, and hijacked a TWA flight to Cuba while menacing a flight attendant with weapons. BLM, whose rallies have featured chants like “Israel, we know you, you murder children, too” also glorifies four individuals who have been implicated in two cop killings.

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Liz Peek: Big spender Biden to blame for inflation and coming debt ceiling brawl

Posted By on January 21st, 2023

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3820478-big-spender-biden-to-blame-for-inflation-and-coming-debt-ceiling-brawl/

In just two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, our national debt has grown by $3.8 trillion. Beginning in 1929, it took the U.S. Treasury 61 years to accumulate that much borrowing.

Yet Biden has the temerity to call Republicans “fiscally demented.” 

The fight over raising the debt ceiling is just beginning, and already the embattled president is insulting those who oppose his reckless spending, which is, as I write this, crashing our economy. It will get worse — the downturn and the name-calling. 

President Biden tossed trillions in unnecessary COVID-19 relief onto a fast-recovering economy, punching up inflation to 40-year highs as too many dollars chased too few goods.   

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget reckons Biden has added $4.8 trillion to our deficits through executive actions and legislation. This is in addition to our normal spending.

Meanwhile, no one – including many Republicans – has been minding the store. 

Now we see the beginning of the recession that the Federal Reserve deems necessary to drive down inflation. Retail sales, housing and manufacturing have turned down. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has said unemployment must go up and growth must go down in order to reach the central bank’s 2 percent official inflation target.   

We are, in effect, about to pay for Joe Biden’s largesse — with people losing their jobs and businesses going under. When our nation’s biggest banks set aside billions to cover expected loan losses, as they just did at the end of the year, it is because they expect companies to default on loans and people to get into trouble financially. This is not an act of God; this is because our leaders spent too much money.   

MOVIES AND TELEVISION, P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Film Festivals are Terrified of Offending Wokes ‘If just one person objects to your film, I can lose my job.’” by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on January 21st, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/film-festivals-are-terrified-of-offending-wokes/

Art, comedy, music and film festivals were the four pillars of the counterculture, always ready for a little round of epater la bourgeoisie. But then art became utterly incomprehensible, music became a series of autotuned copy-and-pasted pop songs by social media influencers and comedy became a struggle session.

Film festivals that once gloried in provocation just feature the same black nationalist celebrations of their racism in their programs. Edginess, once a major staple, has receded in American film festivals. And those European film festivals are dependent on American talent and recognition. The film festivals, like the rest of what’s left of liberal culture, are running scared.

Terracino, a one-name indie director with an A-list festival pedigree, has also been on the wrong side of the simmering culture wars on the circuit. In late 2021, he took a rough cut of his latest narrative feature, “Waking Up Dead,” to some of the major festivals that have shown his work in the past…

“But that’s when the ‘woke’ pushback began,” he says of festival organizer resistance. “My gay lead character [is initially] transphobic, which is something I wanted to explore — transphobia within the gay community — and they had an issue with that. They were scared to show a film with a transphobic lead.” He says he was also asked: “‘Why does your Latino lead have to bond with a white woman?’ I was really taken aback by that one. Here I am, a gay Latino filmmaker, and I have to answer about bullshit racial politics?”

Doesn’t everyone now? Why should a gay Latino director be special?

“If you look at what happened to me, look at ‘UnRedacted,’ ‘woke’ is silencing artists of color and women,” he says. “And it’s interesting to me that you have so many people of color supporting something that is actually silencing people of color. I think this will lead to some very dangerous places and it already has, and I think a lot of artists of color very soon are going to regret this woke ideology.”

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Never Mind, Mishandling Classified Documents Is No Big Deal Remember that thing we were screaming our heads off about? It’s actually nothing to be outraged about. by Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on January 21st, 2023

https://www.frontpagemag.com/never-mind-mishandling-classified-documents-is-no-big-deal/

Leftist abuses go through three steps.

1. Denial – It never happened

2. Bargaining – Even if it happened, it was very different

3. Acceptance – It’s no big deal and everyone does it

Here’s CNN hitting the third stage with Garagegate.

Washington’s little secret: ‘Spillage’ of classified information is a common occurrence – CNN

Remember that thing we were screaming our heads off about? It’s actually nothing to be outraged about.

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The Morning Briefing: Liberal Media Bias Is Alive and More Embarrassing Than Ever By Stephen Kruiser

Posted By on January 21st, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2023/01/20/the-morning-briefing-liberal-media-bias-is-alive-and-more-embarrassing-than-ever-n1663415

I began writing about politics almost 22 years ago. My main focus when I started was liberal bias in the mainstream media. I didn’t intend for it to be my sole focus but, these two-plus decades later, it’s what I’ve written about the most. It’s kind of my thing. It would be nice if it didn’t have to be, but those people are awful, and I still like calling them out.

The way that the main players (The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc.) go about their bias has changed over the years. It’s always been prevalent, but it used to be more subtle. I would have fun figuring out new patterns and tricks, especially in the Times.

That all changed when His High Holiness the Lightbringer Barack H. Obama became president of the United States.

The semi-secret relationship between the MSM and liberal bias came out into the open. The smitten kids in the White House press corps would positively gush whenever The Lightbringer would interact with them. They began dotting their i’s with hearts when jotting down notes about him. It was one nauseating public display of affection after another for eight years.

Since then, nobody in the MSM has bothered to hide the bias, despite the fact that they keep insisting that it doesn’t exist.

It’s really gotten weird with President LOLEightyonemillion in office. They have to prop up the mindless loon in the Oval Office, which must be exhausting. The more Biden obviously deteriorates, the more the flying monkeys in the mainstream media go out of their way to make it seem like he’s not.

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Trump Issues a Warning to Republicans By Rick Moran

Posted By on January 21st, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2023/01/20/trump-warns-republicans-in-congress-not-to-cut-social-security-or-medicare-n1663562

Donald Trump has pretty good political instincts. He wouldn’t have been elected president without them. So when the former president issues a stark warning about the political consequences of Republicans advocating for cuts in Social Security and Medicare in the coming debt-limit battle, the GOP might do well to listen.

When it comes to old-age benefits, no good has ever come from advocating cuts in Social Security and/or Medicare. They’re not called the “third rail of politics” for nothing.

“Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security,” Trump said in a video that was previewed by Politico on Friday. “Cut waste, fraud, and abuse everywhere that we can find it, and there is plenty of it… But do not cut the benefits our seniors worked for and paid for their entire lives. Save Social Security. Don’t destroy it.”

According to Politico, Trump suggested “targeting foreign aid, cracking down on migration, ending ‘left-wing gender programs from our military,’ and end ‘billions being spent on climate extremism.’”

Trump’s position is entirely consistent with his past positions on entitlement reform: let the Democrats take the lead. But Democrats say there’s nothing wrong with either program that a little tweaking wouldn’t cure: raising the retirement age (again), increasing Medicare premiums, cutting payments to doctors and hospitals — all the usual half-baked fixes that have only delayed the inevitable.

When the GAO declares that both Social Security and Medicare are on an “unsustainable” path, no amount of “tweaking” by Congress will save those programs. Medicare is set to run out of cash by the end of this decade, while the Social Security trust fund will be drained by 2035. Both of those programs will end without massive intervention by Congress.