True But Forbidden # 40

Raconteur Report: Hey, About That Border Wall Idiots Think We Aren’t Building… Turns out we have been building one, for some time, and the 57 miles constructed just adjacent to San Diego (for the long-term retarded out there, just one of numerous similar builds underway, not the sole effort) is already helping there. Like you’d expect. That’s 57 miles where you can’t just walk in. Where 1 guy watching miles has time, if you try, to call in back up to pounce on you. Where you can’t cut through. Where you can’t bring in 80# backpacks full of dope. Where a herd of 100 doesn’t get through, including 10 guys who don’t quite look like wetbacks and are carrying Korans and prayer rugs.

So let’s recap. The NeverTrumpers, who are supposed to stand on principle and keep conservatism pure from the Bad Orange Man, consistently have attacked conservatives, voiced support for the destruction of our democracy by the deep state, and urged us to vote for a Democratic Party that is hurtling to the Left. And these are the people “conserving conservatism”?

Sometimes I look at the Socialist—the intellectual, tract writing type of socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation—and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe it is a love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom of all people he is most removed. The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but because it is untidy; what they desire, basically is to reduce the world to something resembling a chessboard. — George Orwell

Time after time the people come under threat from a well understood enemy of bourgeois order and time after time the people in charge do nothing about it. Only the most naive think the Epstein affair or the massive corruption in the FBI will be addressed. At this point, everyone knows the plot. The flow of stories will slow to a trickle and then the whole thing will be forgotten. In time, Epstein’s plotters will be partying with the FBI plotters at Lois Lerner’s Vineyard mansion.

We are having the same people that a couple of months ago screaming and having”The Vapors” about concentrations camps ran by the government, all of a sudden want me to hand my various assorted bullet launchers to the same benevolent government……. We are having the same people who were screeching like gibbon monkeys about the evil of President Trump and the government now want me to hand my assorted bullet launchers to the government of President Trump. We are having the same people that are shrieking “tolerance” and “Diversity” and “acceptance” for everyone……unless you are a conservative gun owner than you need to “Just die”…

The very tactics of those totalitarian movements—intimidation, demonization, and disregard of all rules in favor of politically defined results—have become hallmarks of political correctness today. Some people think political correctness is just silly. But many people thought Hitler was just silly before he took power and demonstrated how tragically mistaken they were. — Thomas Sowell

On Eating Lotus My favorite regional dish is made from fresh lotus root—糯米藕, glazed root stuffed with sticky rice. Whenever I went out to eat with my parents’ friends, instead of asking for fried rice or sweet rolls like most kids, I’d ask for this flavorful dish that is unique to our region. I secretly patted myself on the back for impressing the elders with my “sophisticated” and “cultured” taste. But I also genuinely love this dish; it always makes me feel at home.

AI systems to detect ‘hate speech’ could have ‘disproportionate negative impact’ on African Americans: Study Cornell’s machine learning added another variable not used by other universities. Using a combination of census data, tweet location data, and demographic-specific language, they also trained the system to quantify the same ”€œblack-aligned” or ”€œwhite-aligned.”€ The researchers used five different databases of potential ”€œhate speech”€ tweets. All five yielded the same results: tweets likely from African American’€™s were much more likely to be flagged as offensive than those that were likely to be from whites. Along with the possible oversampling of tweets from African Americans, the researchers believe that this type of machine discrimination lies in the human error of those who are doing the original annotating and classification from which the machine learns.

One internal Google document labelled “coffee beans” appears to show Google employees discussing diversity hiring practices. A related internal thread of communications also shows an apparent discussion about the “coffee beans” document, where one Google employee expresses concern that the document appears to “misrepresent Google’s hiring practices in a way that could raise legal questions…” Another thread of internal Google documents shows Google employees discussing President Donald Trump’s infamous “covfefe” tweet, and a proposed plan to change the Google translation of the term.

Vox Popoli: New Zealand won’t give up its guns The people of New Zealand have seen what has happened post-gun control in both Australia and England. The violence has gotten worse, not better. The governments have gotten more authoritarian, not less. And given the degraded demographic situation in all these countries, only a complete fool would comply with these intrinsically immoral laws and disarm himself.

The fact is you cannot trust our institutions. They are not, and have not been, operating in the interests of Normal Americans for quite some time. They have degenerated into seedy scams run by, and for the benefit of, a garbage ruling caste that inherited the most powerful society in human history and seems determined to do in a couple generations what the Romans took a few hundred years to do –€“ squander it.

The New York Times Rewrites American History The idea that “everything in American history is explained by slavery and race” has become conventional wisdom on the Left. Basically, nothing good has ever happened here, at least not until recently. The Left now includes the public schools, so that one of my kids came home from second grade with the understanding that Martin Luther King had freed the slaves. The essays go on to cover the economy (“If you want to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.”)… This is profoundly stupid. The South had a relatively primitive economy; the North was the home of capitalism, which is why the North had the economic strength to win the Civil War. There was a time when everyone understood this, but the Times has regressed.

At some point, we degenerated. At some point, we decided that virtues like courage were hoary, classical abstractions with no value. At some point, we decided that manners were too uptight and old-fashioned, too “white.” At some point, we decided that America’s Christian inheritance was bad, that the wisdom of Ecclesiastes and the Book of Proverbs was mere superstition. At some point, we decided that the past must be jettisoned, with all its prejudices, and all its lessons.

At some point, America told its men to stop being men. That’s how we ended up with “Fredo.” Most pointedly, at some point, America’s leaders stopped, or at least stopped pretending to be, decent people. Powerful people in all times have done decadent and depraved things behind a mask of gentility. But until recently there was a mystique, at least, an aristocratic semblance that separated the upper crust from the have-nots. These days, it’s hard to tell the difference.

Florida Vacationers Terrorized by Flock of Foul-Smelling Vultures Earlier this year, New Yorkers Anthony and Siobhan Casimano bought a vacation home in the Ibis Golf and Country Club for 702,000 dollar, but when they decided to vacation there, they were shocked to find it had actually been taken over by dozens, if not hundreds of black vultures. They were practically living in the pool area, had destroyed the property’s screened enclosures and did not appear too happy to share the place with its human owners. They pecked at their car, and vomited when they got too close, as a means of self defense. Despite their best efforts to have the issue resolved, the Casimanos remain unable to drive the vultures away and reclaim their expensive property.

By no stretch of the imagination is there any existential crisis of wealth disparity in America, In spite of the insane blatherings of Clamydia Harris and the insane old man from Vermont and Liawatha Warren, America is safe and rich. Hell, even our poor are fat and have flat-screen TVs and cars. As far as I can tell, the current argument is that market economics is a mean poo-poo head, and we should get rid of it so we can all have pet unicorns and free medical care and a guaranteed basic living minimum wage with abortions on tap and no guns and a benevolent central government that will wipe our asses because with Lesbian Poetry degrees none of us can do a damned thing for ourselves..

The root of this is the strange obsession with racism that has become a religion of its own over the last two decades. The anointing of Obama as the completion of the Second Founding, the event that was supposed to wash the stains of slavery, segregation and racism from America, instead ushered in an era of race panic. The Left is in a near frenzy over racism, which they now see everywhere. It is an obsession to the point where even the so-called Right is infected by it.

“The short-sightedness is also exemplified in…    speeches by businessmen on social responsibility. This may gain them kudos in the short run. But it helps to strengthen the already too prevalent view that the pursuit of profits is wicked and immoral and must be curbed and controlled by external forces. Once this view is adopted, the external forces that curb the market will not be the social consciences, however highly developed, of the pontificating executives; it will be the iron fist of Government bureaucrats. Here, as with price and wage controls, businessmen seem to me to reveal a suicidal impulse.”  — Milton Friedman

Piers Morgan: Populism Is Rising Because Liberals Have Become Unbearable | Populism is rising because people are fed up with the PC culture. They’re fed up with snowflakery, they’re fed up with people being offended by everything and they’re gravitating towards forceful personalities who go: “This is all nonsense!”

Federal Energy Program Suggests Keeping Thermostat at 78, Clearly Never Having Experienced a Summer in the South

Info for Your Pledge Drive: NPR Morning Host Makes a Half-Million for Hosting on Saturdays |   Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep’s salary is $509,680 (a 10.5 percent raise); and (now-retired) All Things Considered host Robert Siegel made $455,109 (up 5 percent). The IRS form also reveals another Saturday NPR host — Peter Sagal, hosting a game show called Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me — earning $394,091. That’s making a president-level salary for uncorking nasty jokes like a fake book interview smearing George W. Bush as a drunk and Dick Cheney being the Grim Reaper. Former Morning Edition anchor (now Special Correspondent) Melissa Block was listed at $323,836.

Althouse: “If there is a single micro-genre of American journalism more nauseating than the ‘Jay-Z and Beyonce woke discourse circa 2007-2019,’ I can’t think of it.”