Here a link, there a link, everywhere a link link!

A Taxonomy of Fear

There is a pattern in the way speech is silenced. Understanding it can help us stand up to the illiberalism of this moment.

Once you get through the pro-forma but irrelevant up-front Trump dumping, the article seems right on target. And obviously related:

Survey: Majority of Americans Afraid of Expressing Political Beliefs

Too Many Jobs Feel Meaningless Because They Are

If work that is of no real value has proliferated, no wonder productivity is stagnant.

Overall, many good points, but I wish it had explained the influence of government in rendering so many American jobs meaningless. And speaking of jobs, look at what Seattle;s leftist leaders have done - on purpose - to job creation there:

Seattle’s Tarnished Dream
A generous safety net doesn’t mean much if you can’t find jobs or afford housing.

What went wrong?

Lots. Social benefits for the poor aren’t worth much if the poor can’t afford housing in the city that offers them. A family looking to find a place to live in Seattle must navigate a market where the median two-bedroom apartment lists for more than $2,600 per month. Lower-income families have been priced out into the suburbs. Drive south from Seattle into neighboring Tukwila, and you’ll see the child-poverty rate nearly triple, from 10 percent to almost 30 percent.

Remember - this was done to Seattle on purpose.

If Joe Biden is elected, the effort to remove him by those now supporting him will begin the day after the election and it will not be as crude as rounding up a Yale psychiatrist to testify to his dementia in Congress or shaming the White House physician to give him the Montreal Cognitive Assessment Test in the manner that the Left went after Donald Trump. It will be far more insidious and successful: leaked stories to the New York Times and Washington Post from empathetic White House insiders will speak of how  “heroically” Biden is fighting his inevitable decline –and how gamely he tries to marshal his progressive forces even as his faculties desert him. We would read about why Biden is a national treasure by sacrificing his health to get elected and then nobly bowing out as he realized the cost of his sacrifice on his person and family.

Democratic National Committee platform mentions ‘whites’ 15 times, all damning

They hate half the country. 

Now let's look at the American media:

The Media and the Virus
American press coverage of Covid-19 was first dismissive, then alarmist—but always condescending.

As it unfolded in the media, the story of the pandemic was initially that of a nonevent. On January 31, Vox ran a supposedly comprehensive “explainer” about the coronavirus. There was no need for Americans to wear protective face masks, Vox said, and “really no reason to worry.” On Twitter, Vox was still more blunt: “Is this going to be a deadly pandemic? No.” The hectoring tone and sham certitude are Vox specialties. But Vox wasn’t alone in dismissing the virus. USA Today, the Washington Post, Canada’s National Post, and many other outlets treated the Wuhan virus (as it was then known) less as a matter of objective concern than an instance of mass hysteria.

Their cardinal error, in almost every case, was to rely on the WHO, an organization at best egregiously mistaken and at worst politically compromised, carrying water for the Chinese Communist Party and President Xi Jinping.

If a video is viral, who cares if it’s fake?

Welcome to the age of unreality

Remember, for the Left, which includes almost all the media, truth means the Leninist concept of Revolutionary Truth, and that is how they speak and act and write and broadcast. All the time. 

Like this:

New FBI Notes Re-Debunk Major NYT Story, Highlight Media Collusion To Produce Russia Hoax

The New York Times in 2017 falsely reported that the Trump campaign had 'repeated' contacts with Russian intelligence officials during the 2016 campaign, and instead of being held accountable for publishing lies, the story's authors received Pulitzer prizes.

Deepfake Journalist Is a Terrifying Sign of Things to Come

We have entered a time when there is not merely fake news, but fake journalists. That is, byines and images of a writer who does not exist in the real world. We are entering the time of Matrix reality, where material and virtual reality are merging.

Nets’ Portland Coverage Evaporates After Antifa Attempted to MURDER Agents

Wednesday night saw a major escalation in the conflict at the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon as Antifa terrorists and rioters barricaded federal agents inside the building and tried to set the building ablaze. It was a provocation that could have killed the untold number of agents in the building. Luckily, Antifa failed. But during the Thursday evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC, the Portland coverage largely evaporated, with only NBC Nightly News daring to downplay the attempted murder.

Fox Sports to add virtual crowds to MLB ballparks

Fox Sports announced Thursday it will include computer-generated fans in otherwise empty stadiums for its telecasts this season, starting on Saturday.

“We believe that what we’re doing is creating a natural viewing experience,” said Fox Sports Vice President Brad Zager. “Sports is supposed to be an escape and when people have that escape we want it to feel as normal as possible when there’s very little normalcy, like a crowd at a baseball game on a Saturday."

"We’re not looking to fool everyone. We know it is a virtual crowd. But we also know how jarring watching a game in an empty stadium is on TV," Zager added. 

And that's a wrap.

Two letters on America today

First, Iranian-American Roya Hakakian:

Why I Signed the Harper’s Letter

Then read Bari Weiss' resignation letter to the New York Times:

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong. 

But the NYW Wokers will never agree. Here is a photo of the woke staffers at the NYT demanding final say over what gets published and by whom.

Was Franklin Roosevelt a racist?

Stuff to keep track of

Are AR-15 Rifles a Public Safety Threat? Here's What the Data Say

In any given year, for every person murdered with a rifle, there are 15 murdered with handguns, 1.7 with hands or fists, and 1.2 with blunt instruments. In fact, homicides with any sort of rifle represent a mere 3.2 percent of all homicides on average over the past decade.

Given that the FBI statistics pertain to all rifles, the homicide frequency of “assault-style” rifles like the AR-15 is necessarily lesser still, as such firearms compose a fraction of all the rifles used in crime.

With an average of 13,657 homicides per year during the 2007-2017 timeframe, about one-tenth of one percent of homicides were produced by mass shootings involving AR-15s.

According to a New York Times analysis, since 2007, at least “173 people have been killed in mass shootings in the United States involving AR-15s.”

That’s 173 over a span of a decade, with an average of 17 homicides per year. To put this in perspective, consider that at this rate it would take almost one-hundred years of mass shootings with AR-15s to produce the same number of homicide victims that knives and sharp objects produce in one year.

With an average of 13,657 homicides per year during the 2007-2017 timeframe, about one-tenth of one percent of homicides were produced by mass shootings involving AR-15s.

Speaking of guns, in Texas, 50,000 more babies were killed in the womb in 2017 than by firearms.

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NO POLITICS Initial Analysis of Murders in White Settlement TX Church



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Yeah, as Dr. Phil would say, "How did that work out for you?" From 2004: Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us

· Secret report warns of rioting and nuclear war
· Britain will be ‘Siberian’ in less than 20 years
· Threat to the world is greater than terrorism

And there were these climate swings and misses from 2010-2019, too. Like our fave alarmist, Al Gore.

Oops. Because actually, We're living in (almost) the best of times. For example:

“Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 percent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 percent when I was born,” Ridley writes, referring to the year 1958, a time that some of us can actually remember.

Hey, I want to be a Russian asset, too!

There are so many Russian assets being uncovered that eventually, they will say that I am one, too. I hope!

Racism has declined under Tump

And it also declined under Obama, according to a University of Pennsylvania study just completed.

If you look at the past 10 years, the total level of hate crime is declining in the US, as is the amount of racism and anti-immigration sentiment, and Trump’s victory has done nothing to reverse that. Sociologists at the University of Pennsylvania published a study this year showing that Americans have become less inclined to express racist views since 2016, something true of Republican voters as well as Democrats, and a Gallup poll in June 2019 found 76 percent of Americans believe immigration is a good thing, the highest number to date. The same trends are visible in the UK: the population has become less racist and more pro-immigration since the Brexit vote. The liberal narrative about the toxic effect of the rise of far-right populism turns out to be nonsense.

It’s incredibly hard to show that inflammatory rhetoric, whether on the right or the left, causes violent crime. All we know for sure is that violent crime across the world is declining, something painstakingly documented by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature. 

But it does not fit The Narrative. As Mark Twain did not say, "If you do not read the papers you are uninformed. If you do read the papers you are misinformed."

So Twain did not say that, but in 1807 Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter complaining about the misinformation in newspapers:

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day

Jefferson provocatively suggested the advantages of not reading the newspaper:

I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.

So, race relations have been improving for at least 10 years, racial minorities have seen their standard of living rise faster in the last three years than the white privileged classes, and violent crime is still  falling (just as it has been falling for the last 25 years).

But none of that fits The Narrative so fake news must predominate.

Mass shootings and white supremacy

How many mass shootings occurred in America between July 16 and July 28th, 2019? What was the race of the shooter identified by police?

There were 36 mass shootings across the United States during that two-week period. A white was named as the shooter in one of them. An Hispanic was accused in another one. In the other 34, police identified a black suspect as the shooter.

Violent-crime victims weapons used, Chicago, 2019 so far

All of these shootings were reported in the media, mostly local media only, although the NYT has generally reported them (usually buried in a back page). Here is the list.

The day after the Gilroy shooting, NY Mayor (and presidential candidate) Bill de Blasio was asked by a reporter whether the Gilroy shooting resembled the mass shootings in New York.

"Not all, said de Blasio. “We don’t really count them that way.” 

Why doesn't the Left count them that way? The Chicago Tribune explains that there is no way to politically weaponize black men shooting other black men. But they can weaponize El Paso and Dayton.

Those angry loner white boys with guns, this time in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, have again erupted on the body politic.

And those with eyes to see are reminded that the American culture is ill.

But what of the mass shootings in Chicago, the 55 people shot over the weekend, with seven hit near a park and then eight more not far away?

You might think these are “mass shootings” too, but, in political/media terms, they’re not treated as such. The victims, and in all likelihood the shooters, are black. And Democratic politicians find no political advantage in weaponizing the victims of everyday street violence in a Democratic town. So Chicago’s dead are stepped over by national media and national Democrats on the way to 2020.

Black men killing other black men? That's not news. Middle-class white shooters killing white middle-class shoppers or club hoppers, now that's news!

A clergy colleague of mine wrote me of my observation,

This discussion is beginning to rise among African American pastors, at least in my neck of the woods:  

• There's lots of talk *now* about studies on mass murderers because *white* people are killing folks.
• Why haven't folks been as outraged about gangs?
• Black on black killing?
• Nobody cares about our public schools, where gangs recruit while white folks send their kids to "academies."
• A lot more people have died in urban violence than in mass school killings. Are we not as important? 

It needs to be a both/and where school shootings and urban violence are concerned. But our outrage seems to be selective - and for that, we must repent.

HT: Gerard Vanderleun, who also offers this collage of mug shots of every mass shooter in the US arrested by police from January - July of this year.

Yep, mass shooters are motivated by "white supremacism" all right.

Updates:

"You don't have to be a detective why the liberal media would rather have this story [about the political views of Dayton killer Connor Betts] just fade away. It's not the right kind of mass shooting."

"The Dayton Murderer Is Proof We Need To Take Left-Wing Violence Seriously"

Reuters: FBI finds gunman in Dayton, Ohio, rampage was obsessed with violence

Hollywood Film Depicts Trump Supporters Being Hunted for Sport by Liberals

Universal Pictures is set to release a thriller called The Hunt on September 27, which features left-wing “elites” hunting Trump supporters for sport. 

In the past few days we’ve been hearing a lot about how Donald Trump’s rhetoric is apparently to blame for the El Paso shooting, yet Hollywood apparently lacked the foresight to think that a movie promoting violence against “deplorables” might be in bad taste until after the shootings in El Paso and Dayton, as only now is Universal rethinking their promotional strategy for the film.

"Did anyone see what our ratf**ker-in-chief just did?" one character asks early in the screenplay for The Hunt, a Universal Pictures thriller set to open Sept. 27. Another responds: "At least The Hunt's coming up. Nothing better than going out to the Manor and slaughtering a dozen deplorables."

Update:

State and other persecution of religious people

In last Sunday's lectionary passage from the book of Acts, the apostles are arrested for preaching that Christ is risen. They are questioned before the Jewish priestly Sanhedrin. The high priest reminds them that they had been ordered to stop such preaching.

Peter, speaking for all the apostles, responds, "We must obey God rather than any human authority." Acts records that had not a Sanhedrin member named Gamaliel argued otherwise, the apostles would have been executed that day.

Fast forward to today, and understand that there are still human authorities who will not countenance any resistance to their authority. China, for example, this month:


This was the destruction of one of the largest church buildings in the country. The Guardian reports,

Witnesses and overseas activists said the paramilitary People's Armed Police used dynamite and excavators to destroy the Golden Lampstand Church, which has a congregation of more than 50,000, in the city of Linfen in Shanxi province.

ChinaAid, a US-based Christian advocacy group, said local authorities planted explosives in an underground worship hall to demolish the building following, constructed with nearly $2.6m (£1.9m) in contributions from local worshippers in one of China's poorest regions.

The church had faced "repeated persecution" by the Chinese government, said ChinaAid. Hundreds of police and hired thugs smashed the building and seized Bibles in an earlier crackdown in 2009 that ended with the arrest of church leaders.

Those church leaders were given prison sentences of up to seven years for charges of illegally occupying farmland and disturbing traffic order, according to state media. 

And it is not just Christians. Muslims who have lived in China for centuries have suffered even worse: "Before-and-after photos show how China is destroying historical sites to monitor and intimidate its Muslim minority."

China is waging an unprecedented crackdown on a Muslim minority called the Uighurs, who live in the country's western frontier region, Xinjiang.

Muslims have for centuries settled in the region, sometimes referred to as East Turkestan. 

As part of its crackdown, which has seen the installation of facial-recognition cameras and seemingly arbitrary detentions, China's government has also destroyed traditional Uighur architecture including mosques and large parts of an ancient city called Kashgar.

Before-and-after images show the extent of some of the destruction of these historical locations.

When the state is the religion, it will always crush or suborn all others. Could never happen here, though, right? Oh, the ground is being tilled already. I give you Harvard University, April 25, 2019, and the keynote speaker of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences "Diversity Conference."

We are pleased to announce that our keynote speaker will be Tim Wise, prominent anti-racism writer, educator, and activist. A moderated discussion with Tim will be led by Renee Graham, an associate editor and columnist at the Boston Globe.

This is the same Tim Wise who posted on his Facebook page in 2015:

This is America…people basing their beliefs on the fable of Noah and Ark, or their interpretation of Sodom and Gomorrah…rather than science or logic…If you are basing your morality on a fairy tale written thousands of years ago, you deserve to be locked up…detained for your utter inability to deal with reality…NO, we are not obligated to indulge your irrationality in the name of your religious freedom…but we will provide you a very comfortable room, against which walls you may hurl yourself hourly if your choose. Knock yourself out….seriously, knock yourself out, completely, for weeks at a time…I’m sorta kidding but not by much…I don’t believe lunatics like this should be locked up, but I do think they have to be politically destroyed, utterly rendered helpless to the cause of pluralism and democracy …the world is not theirs. They have no right to impose their bullshit on others. They can either change, or shut the hell up, or practice their special brand of crazy in their homes…or go away. Their choice. And this argument applies to any fundamentalist religionist of any faith who thinks they have a right to impose their beliefs on a secular, pluralistic society. Go away.

That is not only no problem for Harvard, it is positively commendable. 

All that is bad enough. However, persecution of Jews in America (though thankfully, not by the government) is growing. Not only the violent kind, such as the anti-Trump, anti-Jew gunman, John Earnest, who killed one and shot two others in the Chabad of Poway synagogue in Poway, California. Take for example, this cartoon published by The New York Times in its overseas pages this month:

Yes, that infamous propaganda rag of the alt-right, The  New York Times - oh, wait, you say, the NYT is not alt-right? Really? How can you tell?

No wonder that this week Serge Klarsfeld, France's most famous Nazi hunter, said, "There is no safe place on earth right now for Jews." In Washington to receive the Elie Wiesel Prize, the highest award given out by the United States Holocaust Museum, Klarsfeld told reporters,

... the cartoon was "insulting," for Trump as much as for Netanyahu who was "treated like a dog."

"It is an anti-Semitic cartoon, that is to say that Jews are guiding the world and that corresponds to a stereotype very common among the far right, which one also finds on the far left," he said.

Klarsfeld, who spent decades working to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, is worried about the future of Europe and called on centrists to mobilize ahead of the next European elections.

 "Never has a far-right or far-left regime made its people happy and prosperous, inevitably the extremes of power lead to misery and barbed wire."

In rhetoric, the far left and the far right differ only in whom they identify as class enemies. Religiously, the alt-right hates Muslims. The alt-left hates Christians. And they both hate Jews even more. So in practice, there is no distinction with a difference.

Burning churches in France

Update: "If churches keep getting vandalized in France, should American news outlets cover the story?"

As someone who worked as a news reporter (and later a editor) at two major metropolitan dailies (at the New York Post and New York Daily News) and a major news network website (ABC News), I can tell you that any suspicion of arson at a house of worship, for example, is a major story.

It must somehow no longer be the case in the new and frenetic world of the internet-driven, 24-hour news cycle. That’s because a major international story — one involving at least 10 acts of vandalism at Catholic churches in France — went largely unreported (underreported, really) for weeks. The vandalism included everything from Satanic symbols scrawled on walls to shattered statues.

That’s right, a rash of fires and other acts of desecration inside Catholic churches — during Lent, even — in a country with a recent history of terrorism somehow didn’t warrant any kind of attention from American news organizations. ...

The American press in particular has been negligent on this one. In fact, one of the first websites to write about the incidents for American audiences was Breitbart. Did coverage on the politically conservative site dated March 20 suddenly make this a right-wing story? It shouldn’t have. Vandalism, no matter who the potential culprits are, should be reported by journalists. Is there a conservative or liberal way to cover a fire? I never thought so — until now. 

But remember, we learned from The Washington Post after "Easter worshippers" were blown to bits in Sri Lanka that only "far-right" Americans are angered by the murder of Christians around the globe. Apparently - and you will think I am merely snarking, but I am quite serious - killing Christians does not irritate Leftists in the slightest.

Update: "After Notre Dame, France Breaks Its Silence on Radical Islam"

"Easter worshippers" and other Democrat denials

Unless you have been living on the moon, you know that on Easter morning,

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka—A series of blasts tore through churches and luxury hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter morning, killing at least 290 people and wounding more than 400 in coordinated attacks on tourists and the country’s minority Christian community.

At least eight explosions, most blamed on suicide bombers, took place across the country. Restaurants and houses of worship that moments earlier were hosting holiday feasts and joyful services were plunged into chaos, filled with rubble, broken furniture, shards of glass and the wounded and dead.

Remains of a church in Sri Lanka, bombed during worship on Easter morning

Let's see whether we can identify who was targeted by the bombers:

1. The targeted buildings were churches. Only the Christian religion refers to its houses of worship as churches.
2. It happened during worship on Easter morning. Easter is a religious occasion of significance to no one in the world except Christians.
3. Easter is always on the Sunday following the Jewish day of Passover. Passover can be any day of the week, but Easter is only on a Sunday. 
4. Therefore, it stands to reason that the killed and wounded were "Easter worshippers" gathered during a "holy weekend for many faiths." But should we identify them as "Christians"? Of course not. 

Think I jest? Well, here you go (click image to enlarge):

You can't make this stuff up. Do Democrats text each other to set the approved phrases and use of boldface before making public statements? Or is there some secret "message controL web site they consult first? Or is groupthink so deeply embedded in them that they automatically come up with the exact same euphemisms? As Martin G. commented elsewhere, "You've got to admire the message discipline. There was more message diversity at Stalin's 1936 party congress. A Rockette kickline has more individuality. They move through the political landscape with the single mindedness of army ants."

Gosh, as Harry K. tweeted, if only there existed a single word they could have used instead of "Easter worshippers." (I will also add that they unanimously misspelled "worshipers.")

I focus on Hillary's truly insulting tweet, since she is at least nominally a Methodist like me.

First, as I indicated above, this was not a "holy weekend for many faiths." Easter weekend is a holy weekend for exactly one faith: Christianity. This particular year, the Jewish holy day of Passover happened to have begun Friday evening and ended Saturday evening. But that is coincidental since Passover can occur on any day of the week. In 2014, Passover began on Monday evening. But Easter always occurs only on a Sunday. ("Easter Sunday" is repetitive.)

If Hillary had tweeted, "holy this year for two faiths" I would have no complaints except calling the victims "worshippers" instead of Christians. At least she acknowledged that hotels were also targeted because of their foreign guests, so not all the killed were "worshippers." (Three of the four children of Denmark's richest man were killed, for example.)

But the tweet that she sent proves positively that she simply refuses to identify Christian victims of terrorism as Christians because - oh, who the heck knows why? There is no rational basis for such evasions, by her or the other lockstep-language tweeters. (Update: Dennis Prager explains why.)

However, compare Hillary's Sri Lanka tweet to the one she sent out after a gunman attacked Muslims inside their mosques in New Zealand in March:

Note the specificity of the victims, the perpetrator, and the ideology behind the shooter:

• Victims? Muslims.
• Perp? A white supremacist
• Ideology? Islamophobia. 

After New Zealand, Hillary's heart broke for New Zealand and Muslims everywhere in the world. But after Sri Lanka? No heartbreak, only prayers for "everyone affected." The bombers' ideology? Gosh, she has no idea even though the Sri Lankan government knew almost immediately that the bombers were belonged to "Nations Thawahid Jaman (NTJ), a little-known local Islamist group which has previously defaced Buddhist statues" and which "was likely to have been inspired by ISIS," with connections to a "a wider international network" (link). 

Remains of St. Sebastian's Church, north of Colombo.

From CNN web site

 But at least the New York Times was not afraid to name names in the headline: "Blasts Targeting Christians Kill Hundreds in Sri Lanka."

 a few hours on Sunday, suicide bombings hit three Catholic churches and three upscale hotels in the Indian Ocean island nation of Sri Lanka, still recovering from a quarter-century civil war in which the suicide bomb was pioneered. ...

The bombings were the deadliest attack on Christians in South Asia in recent memory and punctuated a rising trend of religious-based violence in the region.

But for Democrat politicos, Newspeak is the order of the day.

Update: Mark Steyn dissects some other media coverage. "Taqiyya for Easter."

Yet throughout Sunday the UK, Aussie, Danish and the rest of the world's media saw their job as thorough obfuscation of the truth. I heard about yesterday's attack from the BBC, which had extensive rolling coverage with correspondents on the ground - and yet seemed mainly to be trying to tell us as little as possible. A lady think-tanker from Chatham House was keen to focus on the brutality with which the Sri Lankan government had ended the Tamil insurgency a decade ago: a fascinating topic no doubt, but utterly irrelevant to the mound of Christian corpses in Colombo that morning. In the entire hour, hers was the only mention of Islam - when she cautioned that it would be grossly irresponsible and "Islam-phobic" even to bring up the subject.

She didn't really need to spell that out, did she? It used to be said that ninety per cent of news is announcing Lord Jones is dead to people who were entirely unaware that Lord Jones was ever alive. Now the trick is to announce Lord Jones is dead and ensure that people remain entirely unaware of why he is no longer alive. One senses that a line was crossed in yesterday's coverage. As one of our Oz Steyn Club members, Kate Smyth, put it, the media have advanced from dhimmitude to full-blown taqiyya.

And if you are The But if you are the Washington Post, the real problem with the Sri Lanka mass murder of Christians is this: "Sri Lanka church bombings stoke far-right anger in the West." Gratefully, the comments left there are fantastic. Australian Arthur Chrenkoff, who was born and raised in Communist Poland, responds:

This effort to use language as a cudgel has several sinister implications. It delegitimises perfectly normal political ideas through guilt by association. It also creates the impression that the (genuine) far right is much bigger, more influential and more threatening and dangerous than it actually is. This in turn is used to downplay and minimise the dangers of Islamist and far-left extremism and terrorism. But perhaps the scariest aspect of it all is that the left, by manufacturing the far right monster, are actually genuinely contributing to the growth of far-right extremism. The relentless flood of identity politics, grievance and victimhood, and shaming and guilting entire sections of population based on their skin colour and culture is genuinely radicalising some misfits into fascism, like the Christchurch terrorist, for example. For every action there is eventually an equal and opposite reaction. The left might think it’s courageously
defanging the fascist dragon but instead it’s just sowing its teeth.

Another response to the WaPo:

The KKK and NYT - separated at birth?

When David Duke, a former Klansman, says it, it is anti-Judaism and hate speech against Jews.

When the New York Times says it, it is penetrating analysis and hard-hitting journalism!

Because Leftism, y'all!

Fake News: London gun crime way up

I call Fake News on this BBC report:

Gun crime in London increases by 42%

That is not possible because in England it is illegal for anyone but government to possess a firearm, except for extremely limited exclusions. And everyone who understands how criminals think knows that if it is illegal for them to possess a firearm, they won't possess one, because it's the law.

Here is the Fake News report:

Gun crime offences in London surged by 42% in the last year, according to official statistics. 

The Met Police's figures showed there were 2,544 gun crime offences from April 2016 to April 2017 compared to 1,793 offences from 2015 until 2016. 

Knife crime also increased by 24% with 12,074 recorded offences from 2016 to 2017.The Met said although crime rates were rising they remained at a much lower level than five years ago. 

Scotland Yard registered annual rises across a number of serious offence categories in the past 12 months, following several years of falls. 

The total number of offences during the 2016 to 2017 financial year was 774,737, an increase of 4% from the previous year when total offences stood at 740,933.

Knife crime offences that resulted in an injury also increased, by 21% to 4,415 from 2016 to 2017, compared to 3,663 offences the year before.

See, that's ridiculous! If evil-doers can't get a gun - and they can't, because guns are illegal in England - it is foolish to think they will use some other weapon, such as a knife, to commit crimes. What kind of fools does BBC think we are to fall for false reporting like that?

Unless we consider, of course, "complex social reasons." Of course.

Progressive problem solving

The problem:

And the solution:

There, they fixed it!

Enough warning flags about Devin Kelly to have started a semaphore battalion

Devin Kelley, the Sutherland Springs shooter, has already started to be disappeared by the news media. I do not mean there is no reporting. I mean that the media template got shredded and so, like Sen. Rand Paul's attacker, Rene Boucher, a registered Democrat and in fact a far-left socialist, media are going to lose interest pretty quickly. (In fact, the most recent reporting about Rand Paul's beating is to blame him for the whole thing.)

Back to mass murderer Kelley. The template is familiar:

Certainly, everyone is familiar with a simple pattern, wherein the media initially identifies the suspect as a white, male, right-wing, Republican NRA member. As the internet begins to organize and share screenshots of the suspect’s social media, layers eventually begin to peel away from the mainstream media dossier. The suspect usually loses the attribute “Republican-registered” first. When a long history of left-wing politics emerges out of social media, the narrative shifts to “white rage” or “toxic masculinity.” Often, the suspect’s race has to go, as it emerges that he was Hispanic, Arab, or central Asian. When the information about the suspect becomes clear, the media consensus emerges: it was the gun’s fault.

This is a case of Templatus Interruptus: 

1. Man commits mass murder.
2. Media and Dems blame weak gun laws and the NRA.
3. Oops - existing law covered it.
4. A federal entity failed to follow that federal law.
5. Hey, let's talk about Trump pouring koi into a fish pond in Tokyo!

So, a federal agency, the USAF, failed to follow federal law requiring it to report Kelley's domestic abuse conviction to the DOJ. The law is 8 U.S.C. 922(g)(9), which bans firearm possession by anyone “who has been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.” The USAF's gross negligence was why Kelly was able to buy his weapon.

It turns out that there were enough ignored warning flags about Devin Kelly to have started a semaphore battalion:

NEW BRAUNFELS, Tex. — The gunman who killed more than two dozen people in a small church outside San Antonio on Sunday had a string of troubling episodes in recent years, including an escape from a mental health facility in 2012 after he was caught sneaking guns onto an Air Force base “attempting to carry out death threats” against military superiors, according to a police report.

Devin P. Kelley’s young life was riddled with warning signs, mounting during and after his time in the Air Force, including a conviction for beating his then-wife and stepson, charges of animal cruelty, mental health concerns, investigations for domestic assault, threats against his family members and a motorcycle crash that left him with lingering physical pain.

Interviews and police and military documents depict Kelley as a distressed — and at-times, violent — man in the years before authorities said he walked into the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., and fired round after round into the congregation gathered for Sunday morning services.

Police in El Paso, reported that five years before the church massacre, officers were dispatched to a bus terminal after Kelley escaped from a nearby behavioral facility. Officers wrote they were told Kelley, who was serving in the Air Force, “was a danger to himself and others” at the time and “was also facing military criminal charges.” While it is unclear why Kelley was at the behavioral facility and whether he ever faced military discipline for the threats, he was court-martialed that same year and convicted of abusing his wife and stepson.

But the Air Force has acknowledged that it did not tell federal authorities about the domestic violence conviction, which should have prevented him from buying firearms, and the revelations about Kelley’s stint in a mental health facility and making threats against his superiors raised new questions about the service’s handling of Kelley and his discharge.

We are getting such reporting - for now. But how long before Kelley drops down the media hole the way James Hodgkinson did. Remember him? I didn't think so.

The NFL and the Wizard of Oz humbug

This was the NFL until last Sunday:

I got to thinking along these lines reading a comment on Glenn Reynold's site left by Thomas Wren in which he, having read my post on the suicide of the NFL, responded,

All Mr. Sensing writes is true but peripheral to the main problem. The NFL is in trouble because its product stinks. Its boring, predictable, violent, almost unwatchable.

To which I replied, "Yeah, you're right, and I kind of added that as an update."  Thomas is right - the games are just boring. In fact, pro football has always been boring - actual playing time barely reaches double-digit minutes, according to the Wall Street Journal.

There are 60 minutes of game clock, split into two section of 30 minutes with about 15 minutes in between. A typical football game lasts, however, about 180 minutes from kickoff to final whistle. And in all that time, we get a mere 11 minutes of actual play.

Buddy, that defines boring.

Even so, Americans in their millions have thought that the NFL was the Wizard of Oz, Great and Powerful! Why? How did the NFL come to be so dominant in both our devotion and our money for half of the year? Why did we think that watching a game in which significant moments last fewer than 10 seconds each, with an average of 16 minutes in between, was exciting?

They were exciting because we looked at them through blinkered eyes. They were exciting because we wanted them to be, and so they were.

It was the mythos. Our imagination was fostered and carefully nurtured by the league and the networks to believe with near-religious fervor that something serious was at stake, that the players were larger than life, different from the rest of us, admirable and good - and most importantly, that the team was actually representing us, the residents of the city the team called home (this was explicitly an appeal made by Tennessee's governor to bring the then-Oilers to Nashville, my hometown).

Now all of that has gone a-glimmering. We now know that the Great and Powerful Oz is a fake, a phony, and behind the curtain is only a curmudgeon kicking dirt onto what we hold dear while demanding that we like it.

The NFL (and most pro sports) have always made money by relying on our willing suspension of disbelief, essential to any fictional story. But we are not willing anymore because last Sunday, they themselves pulled back the curtain. Now you and I can't see them as Oz again because now we know there is no there there. The whole enterprise is just a humbug.


Fans are reconsidering facts they ignored before: they are paying enormous sums to be mocked and scorned - at least $40 for a cheap ticket plus costs of parking and time spent in traffic jams, plus $12 beers, $6 hamburgers and $4 or $5 for a scoop or two of ice cream. And for what? They never really asked that question before very seriously, but now they are.

Television viewers see the games now as played under giant shadow that wasn't there before. The games are now political, amplified by willing accomplices at ESPN and to a lesser but still significant degree, the other networks. That receiver who just made the amazing catch and ran through four defenders into the end zone? While he celebrates like he just found a cure for cancer viewers know that he refused even to take the field to pay respect to the police/military/VFW/first responders honor guard presenting the colors. And I am supposed to cheer him and be happy because hey, he runs fast?

A member of a current-events FB group I read posted this today:

This does it for me. I'm totally through with the NFL. An Army vet who served 3 tours in Afghanistan should not be apologizing for having honored his country, his flag, and the memories of his fallen comrades all to appease his idiotic coach and his teammates who have never sacrificed a thing. I can't take this crap any longer. I've loved my Bears since 1974 and they haven't taken a knee (yet, but it's only a matter of time) but I have to put my country above these ungrateful multimillionaire athletes and coaches, and now ungrateful billionaire owners who are spitting in the faces of their customers. So long, NFL. I wish I could say I'll miss you but I really won't.

So now the games are boring and repulsive. And for enormous numbers of us, that's all they'll ever be.

Endnote: This is an interesting perspective.

The NFL lies down on its deathbed and forbids itself rise

It has been going around the internet that pp. A62-A63 of the NFL's rule book states this:

The problem is that the "league rulebook" (note the imprecision of the term) has zero to say about the anthem - if you are referring to the rule book governing game play. That rule book, available online, never mentions the national anthem and does not have any such pages as A62 or A63.

However, there is another NFL book called the Game Operations Manual, not available to the public, that does have those pages. And according to none other than The Washington Post (!), there is indeed such a rule:

Under the league rule, the failure to be on the field for the anthem may result in discipline such as a fine, suspension or loss of a draft pick. But a league official said the key phrase is “may” result, adding he won’t speculate on whether the Steelers would be disciplined.

The specific rule pertaining to the national anthem is found on pages A62-63 of the league’s game operations manual, according to a league source. 

The WaPo is firewalled (it's owned by Bezos after all), but Time magazine confirms it. At this point, though, I would say that the rule of the Game Operations Manual no longer matters.

Three teams on Sunday stayed inside their locker rooms rather than take the field sidelines for the anthem, the Steelers in Chicago, the Seahawks and Titans both playing in Nashville. Attendance at the Titan's home game yesterday was 69,127, only 16 short of every seat. I'll try to remember to post the next home game's attendance here, too. (I have abandoned the NFL so I do not even know when their next home game is.)

In Chicago, a lone Steeler, former US Army officer and Ranger Alejandro Villanueva, left the locker room and saluted the flag while the anthem was played. His reward was two-fold:

First, he was excoriated by that empty suit of freedom respectfulness, his own head coach, Mike Tomlin.

But the second reward is, well, a reward: Sales Of Alejandro Villanueva Jerseys Skyrocket After Being Only Steeler To Stand For National Anthem

I posted 23 days ago that The NFL continues its slow suicide, with both attendance and TV viewership having declined for a few years in  row now. With this weekend's demonstrations, the NFL has made full transition from an athletic organization to a political one. So what will attendance and viewership do now? Well, Sunday night's game  - after the full afternoon of televised abstentions and kneeling - was down eight percent from just last week and was the worst this year.

LA Times reporter Lindsey Thiry tweeted this shot of last Thursday night's game stadium at kickoff time - this was before the Trump-storm and fury:

Also, remember that the stock market is a futures market: "NFL Broadcasting Stocks Slump As Protests Rise And TV Ratings Fall."

During the past month the overall stock market is up more than 2% but shares of companies that broadcast NFL games--Comcast, Walt Disney, Fox, CBS--are all down between 1% to 8%. ...

Towards the end of last season some felt the NFL's ratings dip would be temporary and therefore would not ultimately hurt the networks by forcing them to reimburse advertisers. Instead, the opposite has happened.

Ratings for the the NFL have been worse this season and attendance for some games has also been disappointing. The networks will pay over $5 billion this season to televise the NFL and were already facing unflattering margins on advertising profits. An article in The Hollywood Reporter reckons the drop in NFL ratings could trim the broadcaster's earnings by $200 million. Disney's ESPN, meanwhile, also continues to get hammered by cord-cutting.

I commented elsewhere that one thing the protesting players have done is lead viewers to look at the game and the league with new eyes and a new perspective. Even before this season, millions of them already concluded that they don't miss watching the games after all. Now with political conventions by disgruntled multi-millionaires being held every Sunday when there used to be football games, how many more millions will decide to use that time for other things?

It might be worth pondering some demographics here. One is that Millennials are not watching the games in anywhere near the same numbers as their parents.

Some observers believe that American football is dying a slow and painful death. ...

The threat to American football is no illusion. In a recent study, four out of five millennials stated that they were less trusting of the NFL than basketball, baseball, hockey or NASCAR. Out of those surveyed in the study, 61% identified the NFL as a “sleazy” Organisation, while 54% saw it as being anti-gay.

In another study, teenage interest in the NFL was found to have fallen from 26% to 19% over the last two decades.

And that was written in February of last year. Another demographic supports the case that the NFL laid down on its death bed long before the kneelers started kneeling.

“Just four years ago, we had so many boys signing up for football, we had five teams at this fourth-grade level,” says John Herrera, a dad, software engineer and football coach of the Wheaton Rams in the Bill George Youth Football League in the western suburbs of Chicago.

“And from five teams of fourth-graders four years ago, what do we have now? One team. Just one.”

Out on the field, the Wheaton Rams and the Lyons Tigers were going at it, having fun. Parents and grandparents watching, sipping lattes, a few dads nervously pacing the sidelines as dads always do, willing prowess on their sons.

But what do the numbers from the hometown of the “Wheaton Ice Man,” the great Red Grange, tell us about football in America?

“If dropping from five teams of fourth-graders to one doesn’t tell you what’s happening, nothing will,” Herrera said. “Football is such a great game, it teaches great lessons to young men. But I’ve got a sense of dread for this game of football that I love.”

But take heart! There is hope that the NFL season may end well after all! Doomsday Rescheduled: ‘Researcher’ Moves End Of The World To October.

And not a moment too soon.

Update:

I do not listen to Rush Limbaugh but I think he nailed it here:

I did not watch the National Football League yesterday, and it was the first time in 45 years that I made an active decision not to watch, including my team, the Pittsburgh Steelers. It was not a decision made in anger. It was genuine sadness. I realized that I can no longer look at this game and watch this game and study this game and pretend, you know, fantasize, everything a fan does. This whole thing has removed for me the ingredients that are in the recipe that make up a fan.

The mystique is gone. That actually started vanishing a while ago. The larger-than-life aspect of it is gone. The belief, the wish, the desire that the people in the game were the best and brightest and special, and that’s why they were there, that’s gone.

Also Law Prof. William A. Jacobson: Dear NFL: I’m not “boycotting” you. I just don’t care anymore, about you.

I’m officially over the Cowboys, the Patriots and the NFL. You were once one of the loves of my life. But now we’re breaking up, and it’s you, not me.

I’m not “boycotting” you. I just don’t care anymore.

You tried to make me care, but now I don’t care at all, about you.

Pretty much, yeah.

Update: Thanks to Donald M. who emailed me to point out that the Steelers played at Chicago's Soldier Field, not Pittsburgh (correction made above). He added, "So effectively, on Gold Star Mother Sunday - a day set aside to honor the families of soldiers who died in battle - at Soldier Field - named such to honor soldiers who died in the field - the Steelers refused to honor the flag and the National Anthem."

Update: My followup is here: "The NFL and the Wizard of Oz humbug"

Update: Well, I have to admit that this never occurred to me:

Peak professional football was probably a dozen years ago. It was around then that white mothers, especially divorced middle-class mothers, started turning against youth football. They did not want their little baby being run over by black kids. That’s why the concussion hysteria gained traction. It’s a ready made excuse for pulling the white kids out of football, that lets white women pretend it is not racism driving their decision. After all, they loved Will Smith in the concussion movie!

It’s why the NFL’s decision to let their blacks kneel during the anthem is going to be a disaster for them. The owners signed off on it thinking it added drama and would therefore draw in girls, because girls and girly-men like drama. Instead, those kneeling black players are a stark reminder to white women that the sport of football is for violent black men, not nice suburban white boys. Youth participation in football is collapsing and this will only serve to accelerate it. The NFL has now made football anti-white and un-American.

Hmm.