Posts Tagged ‘Useful Idiots’
Die MSM, Die – The lying list
An ongoing updated reference list
Technically a lie occurs when you say something that you know is not true. By that definition the MSM is not “lying” in most of the following cases.
No, they simply decided on a narrative and never bothered digging any further to see if it was true or not – and the best lie is the half-truth.
Or perhaps the best lie is simply burying the story under the guise of editorial discretion.
The following list is hardly comprehensive, which makes it appalling in its own right.
Nov 2022 – The LGBTQ nightclub shootings, Paul Pelosi attack, and Jennifer Ruth Green.
A quick summary of previous MSM lies:
General Collections of lies:
- April 2021: A partial List of MSM lies
- June 2021: Eight Anti-Trump Narratives The Media Finally Had To Admit Were False All Along
March 2021 – Georgia “Find the fraud”
- The WaPo makes a “correction”
- Other MSM colluded on the same single source.
- The NYT gets ripped apart
The Jan 6 Insurrection
- February 2021: The MSM lies about Jan 6.
- April 2021: Two monstrous lies from the NYT
Afghanistan
- April 2021Russian Bounties on US Soldiers.
The Steele Dossier
- May 2021: The NYT’s limited modified hangout.
- May 2021: The WaPo walkback on the Guliani story
- Nov 2021: WaPot revisionism
- Nov 2021: On the WaPo & the dossier
Hits on other GOP figures:
- April 2021: DeSantis – The 60 Minutes hit job that backfired.
- May 2021: WaPo “fact check” on Senator Tim Scott
June 2021: The Lafayette park Riot, Police Action and Trump.
- The Media tale collapses
- The MSM did not “get i wrong”, they lied
- CNN’s Jim Acosta hard hit
- NBC’s Chuck Todd spins his own lies
- CNN”s Jake Tapper and Never Trumper David French
- CNN”s Brian Stelter ignores the IG report
- DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, ordered the tear gas
Black Lives Matter coverage
Die MSM, Die – Recent Lies revealed
A few days ago a guy shot up an LGBT nightclub, killing five people. The US MSM immediately went apeshit, blaming the Republican’s fights against Trans “education” of little kids in schools for creating the Atmosphere Of Hate™ that triggered this Tucker-Carlson-watching-Trump-voting-ULTRA-MAGA man to commit his dreadful crimes.
One of the harshest MSM “journalists” on this narrative was the NBC’s Ben Collins.
And then the Narrative fell apart when the charge sheets were released and it was discovered that the guy insisted on They/Them pronouns.
Yeah. He’s Trans. And all of sudden the message had to be changed, with Ben Collins leading the way in explaining how the guy had been bullied by “Edge Lords” online a few years ago and had finally snapped, etc, etc. This bullshit was summed up perfectly here by Miller’s Tweet.
That’s the extent of their “news gathering.” They’re just Twitter partisans offering up the most repugnantly ignorant and tribalistic twitter hot takes, except instead of just pumping them out on Twitter, the “news” organisations put their Hot Twitter Takes right on television and call them “disinformation reporting.” I’m sure they love Gays Against Groomers.
Local reporters did the work. Amazing how often that has been the case with the US MSM in recent years. But this is true of 100% of these assholes in the new really fake news fields of “fact checking,” “social media coverage,” and “disinformation.” Even in a general field of fake news, these guys stand out as really really fake news. They do no reporting. They do no interviews. Oh wait! No, they’ll send you a nasty DM demanding comment five minutes before the hit piece they’ve written on you goes to print. (Or a couple hours after, in the case of Taylor Lorenz.)
As far as the blame game is concerned you have actually heard all this before:
By mid-afternoon, a graphic with crosshairs “targeting” Democrat districts was shown on CNN, MSNBC, Huffington Post DailyKos, and dozens of other shows and internet sites about every 30 seconds. The map, they loudly claimed, was definitive proof that Sarah Palin’s PAC map had incited Loughner. Palin was to blame. The right was to blame. All Republicans were to blame. By nightfall, the torches were lit and the pitchforks were out. The mob was collectively screaming for blood; the mob wanted Palin’s head on a pike.
That myth, that Sarah Palin’s “crosshairs map” caused that 2011 shooting, has become legend in the same manner of “Hands up, Don’t shoot” or George Floyd has done. Lefties just automatically believe it – and their MSM is worse.
Of course, only a couple of weeks ago there had been a similar story when Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, got hit over the head with a hammer by some weird guy who turned up at his house in San Francisco. In this case it may have had more of a political effect since it happened just before the Mid-Term elections. A brief summary of the MSM takes:
Over on The Daily Blog, good old one-eyed GOP-Christian hating Leftist Paul Buchanan was all over these claims that the attacker was a “MAGA guy. A clear MAGA QAnon guy. The full works”. Sure, Trump voters and MAGA supporters are often found amidst nudist protesters who live in leftwing communes in San Francisco, decked out in BLM signs and gay pride flags.
The bullshit got so bad that an NBC reporter in Washington D.C. got suspended when he committed the unforgivable sin of reporting that the San Francisco Police body cams showed that Pelosi had opened the door for them in a relaxed manner and then walked away from them to stand beside the guy.
Doesn’t sound like he was facing a terrifying MAGA supporter.
The story was pulled and the reporter suspended, with NBC commenting about “NBC standards” not having been followed.
And then, after the Mid-Term elections, a new report appears, courtesy of – you guessed it – another local reporter, that states exactly the same story.
“According to a source familiar with the investigation, who personally watched the police body camera footage from that night, officers knocked on the door of the Pelosi home and then backed away, and the video clearly shows Paul Pelosi open the door with his left hand, just like what was noted in the documents filed by the DA’s office.
“Now, also, as written in the DA docs, the source tells us the body cam video shows officers having a brief conversation with Pelosi and David DePape…before DePape starts beating Pelosi with a hammer.”
The local reporter, who works for a SF affiliate NBC station, has not been suspended and his story has not been pulled. But of course, the Mid-Term’s are past.
Then there is this story:
That’s Jennifer Ruth Green, a 20 veteran in the Air Force, Lieutenant Colonel and now an Air Force Reservist, running in the Indiana 1st District for the GOP. She lost 52.8% to 47.2% against a white man. The following may have had something to do with this:
A few weeks ago Politico ran a hit piece on her, revealing that she had once been the victim of a sexual assault in the Air Force. Why would they reveal this? It doesn’t actually hurt her; it was a gratuitous invasion of privacy. It was the propaganda media just straight up saying, “If you cross us, we will destroy you.”
People cried foul, pointing out that this leak could have only have come from her sensitive confidential government records. Politico claimed no no no, nothing like that, this was a perfectly legal FOIA disclosure. People again said: FOIA requests do not disclose the confidential sexual assaults that military personal might have been victim of. Politico stuck to its story, claiming this was all a legal FOIA request and response.
Politico are Democrat partisan liars.
“On yesterday’s call, the Air Force took full responsibility for improperly releasing Lt. Col. Green’s confidential personnel records to an opposition research firm just weeks before the midterm election. Lt. Gen. Davis informed us that the leaker has been identified and will be held accountable.”
An opposition research firm you say?
Only two Democratic outside firms are working on the Mrvan-Green race, according to Federal Election Commission filings. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has paid the Due Diligence Group more than $78,500, while the Mrvan campaign has paid Deep Dive Political Research $10,000.
As always, all this leads to the following question that was raised after the Fetterman-Oz debate revealed how bad a shape Fetterman was in.
Protests (Good and Bad)
As we all now know there are “good” protests and “bad” protests. The recent Van Gogh protest was so “good” that it was actually enabled by the museum, who did nothing to stop these vandals.
The litmus test is whether the protest is against something that the TPTB support (bad) or in favour of (“good”), and while the former got lots of MSM support from the 1960’s to about the 2000’s, it’s notable that with the demise of the old, square, conservative world and its replacement by the Counter-Culture, the MSM continues to align with the latter and no longer afflicts the comfortable or speaks truth to power – and all those other Nineteen Eighty Four’ish slogans that were chanted by the Left.
The latest is seen in the picture opposite and naturally receives the high praise of none other than one of those 1960’s/70’s Truth To Power protestors, John Minto, in a TDB article praising this group of people who blocked the Wellington motorway, screwing with the lives of decidedly non-powerful, ordinary people.
One of those people,”Terry”, spoke up on the post:
Okay so last week I took time off work as my elderly mother has a specialist appointment at Wellington Hospital. Due to these idiots we were late, causing a huge amount of stress…But fuck those white middle class wankers! I’ve taken my car to work all this week to spite them. And it’s turned out to be quicker and more convenient than the train at about the same price. I’m planning on using my car from now on.
Which drew this response from one “Ross Davies” that just oozes warmth and compassion…
Perhaps this is the definition of cutting off your nose to spite your face? Obviously you were looking for an excuse to use your car without having to think about the effect on the environment. And presumably you didn’t support their cause of passenger rail or climate action? And sorry about your Mum. She must be even angrier than you about all this.
That’s the mentality that drives this; the all-encompassing fanaticism of diamond-plated self-righteousness that allows for no empathy or ordinary decency: a trait no better defined than by C.S. Lewis writing on tyranny:
The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
However, the response to this bastard was gold:
“Fuck You” doesn’t get better than that.
But there are also funny protests, as when some group called “Scientist Rebellion”, recently glued themselves to the floor in the Volkswagen factory in another climate change protest. The response of the workers was to simply leave work for the day, switching off all the lights and heating (energy conservation is big in Germany). This left the protestors whining about how they had no food, light, warmth – not even “a bowl to urinate and defecate in a decent manner while we are glued”. Oh no, the horror, the horror:
But back to the “Bad protests”, the ones that nowadays don’t get MSM coverage, as noted by the website, NotTheBee:
Click on that link and you’ll see plenty of the following:
The reason they’re not getting MSM coverage is that they are the opposite of The Narrative that the MSM and TPTB have agreed upon, which is that people are willing to sacrifice the loss of reliable, affordable energy to battle Climate Change and Putin.
While I’m onboard with the latter fight it’s amusing to note that The Narrative simply cannot admit the connection between them. That Europe’s energy problems are a result of it’s insane pursuit of unreliable, renewable energy sources and forcible move away from fossil fuels (and in Germany, nuclear power also) – with the resulting back-handed, hidden reliance on Russian energy sources to compensate which has led them to this pass.
Man clubbed to death – live on CNN
This is what happens when you’re a cretin and a TV anchor (but I repeat myself) with all the Lefty soundbites needed for TV, but a birdbath deep knowledge of history – and you come up against someone at least as verbally slick as yourself – but smarter and more informed.
She was brilliant in agreeing with his premise and then turning the tables on him. The look on his moronic face and his silence when she finishes talking is just priceless. You can almost see the gears turning upstairs and – he has nothing so ends the segment.
Lemon was recently demoted to some CNN morning show and was on tenterhooks about getting fired like Stelter, John Harwood and others. This won’t help his employment prospects, let alone promotion back to prime time.
For future reference in case that Twitter link gets killed, here’s what she said:
“Well, I think you’re right about reparations in terms of, if people want it though what they need to do is you always need to go back to the beginning of a supply chain.
Where was the beginning of the supply chain? That was in Africa, and when it crossed the entire world, when slavery was taking place, which was the first nation in the world that abolished slavery? The first nation in the world to abolish it, it was started by William Wilberforce, was the British. In Great Britain, they abolished slavery.Two thousand naval men died on the high seas trying to stop slavery. Why? Because the African kings were rounding up their own people, they had them on cages waiting in the beaches. No one was running into Africa to get them.
And I think you’re totally right. If reparations need to be paid, we need to go right back to the beginning of that supply chain and say, ‘Who was rounding up their own people and having them handcuffed in cages?’ Absolutely. That’s where they should start. And maybe, I don’t know, the descendants of those families where they died in the high seas trying to stop the slavery, that those families should receive something too, I think, at the same time.”
Before you get too excited about the words of one Englishwoman who’s not going to accept such debate framing, you need to take a look at these other members of England:
Your Daily Sniff and Vomit
And just like that, #MeToo and #BelieveAllWomen were dead.
Have you purged yourself today?
Have you digested your breakfast and lunch?
No coffee, wine, whiskey or other drinks at hand at the moment?
Good. Then you are ready for this.
Nothing new here of course, as Liberal loudmouth actress Alyssa Milano already demonstrated two years ago.
I’m guessing that all of these women are sickened by OrangeHitler and that none of them ever paid any attention to Tara Reade (who?), even though VP Kamala Harris did.
As did others. Which makes sense given that this guy has history.
Related, Not a mask but a sickbag.
Hunter Biden and the corruption of Washington D.C.
Actually that’s not the latest. The latest is video showing the bastard coaching one of his whores to keep saying that she’s “okay,” and keeps asking her to affirm that he never hit her – on camera. Then he paid her off. Looking at other language in the video – “I didn’t hurt you.” “I didn’t bruise you.” “I’m offering you water. Who are you calling?” “I treat you better than other clients do.” – It’s pretty clear that he physically abused this woman and is trying to coach her into saying “he never hit me, your honour, and if he did, I was asking for it.“
All this is just more stuff from the laptops that Joe Biden’s drug-addled, boozehound, prostitute-using ne’er-do-well son, Hunter Biden, in his permanently trashed state, abandoned after he dropped them off for repair. It adds to the emails, photos and recently even a voicemail from dear old Dad himself.
But before we get to the rest of the news of America’s premier political crime family – the Clinton’s having fallen far behind (Ethics Experts Alarmed By 93% Decrease In Clinton Foundation Donations Since $250 Million Peak In 2009) – take a look at this list.
Once those folk are out of politics I’m sure Wall Street will want to snap them up as traders. But maybe they just had a good year. It’s year-on-year consistency that truly tells how good you are.
Here’s another example of the corruption: Former head of the Federal Reserve and now Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen was paid $7.2 million in total for speeches given to financial firms. Due to the lockdowns they were all done via Zoom. Nice work if you can get it.
But you need to understand that this is not exactly secret. Yellen disclosed these as part of her applying for the job of Treasury Sec. It’s transparent, and was met with a shrug of the shoulders by GOP and Democrat alike, because they’re the same (see above), or hope to be one day.
And it’s systemic corruption rather than just a few people: that’s what makes it so bad. Yellen is already paying off for the Biden family:
Suspicious Activity Reports (SARS) are generated by banks whenever there are suspicious transactions from shady people — usually foreign criminals, terrorists, or gangsters. In case you’re wondering, “Maybe people routinely get hit with a lot of SARs,” Rep James Comer, (R-Ky) who has a background in banking, says it’s very unusual for an American citizen to get hit with “more than one” SAR in his lifetime. And he says that if someone gets multiple SARs, the bank usually tells the client, “Find another place to do business.” They don’t need the problems associated with providing banking services for criminal enterprises.
Hunter Biden and Joe’s brother James have racked up one hundred and fifty SARs in the last few years, most of them tied back to transactions with Ukrainian, Russian and Chinese businesses. This is known because the Treasury department had to hand them over to the Senate Finance Committee and the House Oversight Committee when they were controlled by the GOP. But now the rules have been changed; to get the SARS requires majority consent in Congress – meaning the Democrat Party has to approve.
Who put this rule in place? Janet Yellen of course.
Back to the laptop contents. More important than the sex and drug videos were emails showing that Hunter and his family were and are up to their eyeballs in crooked deals with Ukranians and Chinese businesses, who paid Hunter a fortune for nothing but his family name and access to his dad. In Miranda Devine’s book is this exchange:
As [Joe Biden’s brother] Jim talked, [Hunter’s business partner Tony] Bobulinski marveled at the political risk to Joe’s career if his family’s flagrant influence peddling during his vice presidency came to light.
“How are you guys getting away with this?” he finally asked. “Aren’t you concerned that you’re going to put your brother’s [2020] presidential campaign at risk? You know, the Chinese, the stuff that you guys have been doing already in 2015 and 2016, around the world?”
Jim chuckled and looked knowingly at Bobulinski.
“Plausible deniability,” he said
No wonder that Democrat allies reacted as they did. In one of the most extreme example of media bias in US history, the rest of the US MSM simply refused to cover the story. In this they were aided by the New Media of Facebook and Twitter, which did everything they could to bury what was undoubtedly a story that could have killed Joe Biden’s election chances.
Moreover they went to the extent of pushing back on the news, even bringing back the old Russian Collusion bullshit, claiming that the whole thing was Russian disinformation, a claim made courtesy of 51 former Intelligence officials.
As none other than former Rolling Stone editor and reporter (and solid lefty) Matt Taibbi said about the belated confirmation that the laptop and its data was real (read that entire TownHall article):
In a just world this would be career-altering news for the parade of media figures who spent months loudly insisting the opposite, cheered the unprecedented decisions by Facebook and Twitter to restrict access to the story, and repeated the Langley-driven fiction that it was a Russian smear. The fact that none of them are bothering to comment on any of this shows that the line between the intelligence community and commercial media has blurred to the point of meaninglessness. They know everyone knows they screwed this up and are long past pretending to care.
Of course, as former Democrat Senate leader Harry Reid said years later of his 2012 smear job about Mitt Romney’s taxes: “I don’t regret that at all. Romney didn’t win did he?”
Liberal reporter Michael Tracey had much the same reaction at the time of the original story:
As he points out in that series of Tweets, reporters used to condemn censorship whereas they now demand it from the likes of Facebook and Twitter.
They also went after the man that Hunter had abandoned the laptops with and who had given them to the FBI, foolishly thinking they’d investigate the contents.
As big an outfit as NBC went after the relatively minor Right-wing media site RedState when they released an equally explosive report based on other investigations (separate from the laptop) of the Biden clan’s connections with China:
The week before Election Day, RedState published a series of articles about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, based on a 64-page report from researchers who combed public records to reveal how compromised the Biden family is to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). You can read Part 1 here. The four-part series lays out deeply disturbing connections between Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, John Kerry, and the CCP.
…
The pro-democracy news outlet Apple Daily, based in Hong Kong, used an earlier 40-page version of the report and was the first to report on its findings. In response, NBC News launched a coordinated attack on one of the publishers of the report, Christopher Balding. This attack had all the appearances of being coordinated with the Biden campaign and it had the effect of benefiting the CCP.The report goes into intimate detail about the deep connections between the Biden family and the CCP. In fact, Hunter Biden’s company BHR is listed as a subsidiary of the Bank of China, owned by the CCP.
There’s a massive amount of detail at that link but, like the NYT/WaPo approach to the NY Post, NBC simply went after the one of the publishers and ignored everything else.
But that was before the election. The truth can start to be allowed to leak out, courtesy of the announcement that Hunter is under criminal investigation by the Delaware AG for tax problems and other financial fraud. Understand that this is more than just tax, which would be handled by the IRS if it were. No, there’s a lot of heat here for Hunter, and by extension his father. Hence this cartoon’s joke about the phone call from dear old Dad to Hunter talking about an NYT report on some aspects of the China links and how Hunter is now “in the clear”.
Joe Biden has said repeatedly that he never spoke to his son about his business dealings. In particular, he denied that his son ever made money related to China.
We’ve shown in the past how both of those statements were lies.
Joe met with several business partners of Hunter’s while he was vice president. That included when he met with business associates from Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan at a dinner at the Cafe Milano in Georgetown, in 2015.
The voicemail is thus merely the latest evidence showing that President Biden has long known all about these business deals between China and his son. But even the Delaware AG-IRS investigation stinks:
Last summer [2020], federal officials in Delaware investigating Hunter Biden faced a dilemma. The probe had reached a point where prosecutors could have sought search warrants and issued a flurry of grand jury subpoenas. Some officials involved in the case wanted to do just that. Others urged caution. They advised Delaware’s U.S. Attorney, David Weiss, to avoid taking any actions that could alert the public to the existence of the case in the middle of a presidential election.
“To his credit, he listened,” said a person involved in the discussions, reported here for the first time. Weiss decided to wait, averting the possibility that the investigation would become a months-long campaign issue.
To his credit? Are you fucking kidding me? AYFKM? To make this even juicier Weiss was appointed by Trump and although such people are usually fired by incoming administrations, Biden has left this Solid Citizen in place.
Trump sure has great instincts when it comes to personnel, doesn’t he? FFS!
Miranda Devine (author of The Laptop From Hell) sees the Politico piece as a guide to where this will go:
Hmmm. Politicized inaction is now a virtue? Tigani case went nowhere and not because Delaware is squeaky clean. Politico the go-to outlet for regime Hunter Biden narrative: eg John Brennan’s letter trashing laptop as “Russian disinfo”. Prelude to whitewash
She thinks that the they’ll come to some arrangement with Hunter that sees him pay IRS fines – while also sealing the investigation so that nobody can see all the other stuff they would have found. The sort of stuff that RedState and Apple Daily found and that investigative reporter Peter Schweitzer’s new book, Red-Handed, has dug up more of:
The Biden family scored $31 million from five deals in China, all with individuals with direct ties to the Chinese spy apparatus…Multiple financiers with direct ties to Chinese intelligence partnered with Hunter Biden during and after his father’s time as Vice President — including the former head of the Ministry of State Security and the head of foreign intelligence recruitment — and some of those relationships remain intact… Schweizer explains that Beijing saw a financial relationship with the Bidens as an opening for “elite capture,” which allowed Hunter Biden to secure meetings and score major deals with people in the highest levels of Chinese financial institutions and the Chinese Communist Party — and in return they would be able to leverage the Bidens’ power for their interests.
The same type of influencing crap that the CCP has tried to pull here in New Zealand with both the National Party (Jian Yang) and the Labour Party (Raymond Huo).
To that end I find I found this final paragraph from that TownHall article sad in its optimism:
There’s only so much you can sweep under the rug, and even if you cover it, the stench of the crap fills the room. It’s unavoidable. Joe Biden and his son did dirty deals. The emails shine a light on this web of deceit and corruption. Recently, we learned that Modest Joe is rolling in it with $5.2 million in undisclosed income. So many questions will rope in Hunter Biden and eventually lead once again to the emails on his laptop and the deals that were reportedly hashed out.
You can’t keep this game up forever, guys.
Oh I think they can – because so many of them are up to their armpits in this shit.
Do you need an NKVD for this?
Based on history I would have said yes. Certainly the collectivisation of Russian farms in the USSR and Mao’s Great Leap Forward could not have been achieved without having a State police force pointing their firearms at unarmed civilians.
On the other hand, the last two years of General Tso’s Sickness has persuaded me that there are rather large chunks of our society who will willingly bend to the wishes of the State if they are both terrified enough and sense that opposition to the State’s plans is small and weak, plus another chunk that think they’ll be the ones in charge of all of this.
But what will happen to the land? Mr Kotsko already has that planned out too:
Because that has worked so well in the past. But aside from Communist failures the fact is that this ties in well with environmental groups, from the Very Far Left Sea Shepard, to the hideously wealthy capitalist sociopaths of the World Economic Forum – if the intention is to greatly reduce the size of the planet’s human population, which would solve all manner of problems.
I had no idea who this clown was, but he’s more than just another Toxic Twitter Leftist: he has his own Wikipedia page:
Adam Kotsko (born 1980) is an American theologian, religious scholar, culture critic, and translator, working in the field of political theology.
“Political Theology”? Ewwwwww. Sounds scary, even if it is a good description of what passes for politics nowadays. He’s also written a number of books, including Why We Love Sociopaths (2012): no word on whether he meant it as a warning or an instruction manual, possibly for the WEF. He certainly has not applied its analytics to himself.
Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you – unless indeed you fail to meet the test!?– 2 Corinthians 13:5
The delicious bite of reality
Let’s start with the good news before getting into the bad news.
Investment Giant BlackRock Loses $1.7 Trillion In Six Months
BlackRock lost $1.7 trillion of its clients’ money since the beginning of the year — the largest sum ever lost by a single firm over a six-month period, according to a Wednesday report from Bloomberg analyst Marc Rubenstein.
Blackrock are one of the largest fund managers in the world, controlling trillions of dollars of their clients’ funds – which is often the retirement and pension savings of typical American investors.
So why is this good news? Because BlackRock have been one of the leading proponents of the bullshit known as ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), insisting that companies it invests in use this method of measuring themselves rather than boring old crap like revenue, profits, dividends and ROI (Return on Investment):
By adopting ESG goals — or, in the case of BlackRock, pushing portfolio companies into adopting ESG goals — executives commit themselves to pursuing green energy, appointing a certain number of minorities to serve as managers, or otherwise blending profitability with progressive politics.
BlackRock have been bullying bastards on this matter since they have so much financial power. They even managed to place three environmental activists on the 12-person board of Exxon Mobil. That’s how much power they have.
Or perhaps had. You’ve all heard of luxury goods, things you can buy when you have a lot of money. Well there are also things called luxury ideas; electric cars in a world of $NZ 20/litre petrol; a world of organic farming and 100% renewable energy, But also very gauzy academic ideas like ESG or White Privilege and Critical Race Theory.
Which is to say that when times get tough, when the food, the petrol and the money start running out and that Bachelor in Environmental Gender Studies just ain’t pulling in the big bucks, luxury ideas tend to get jettisoned, and right quick. BlackRock is not at that stage yet; more pain must be inflicted on them.
However, an exclusive Daily Wire poll conducted by Echelon Insights showed earlier this year that 64% of respondents believe “individual investors whose savings are being invested” should ultimately decide whether retirement funds and pension plans are allocated according to ESG criteria. A mere 20% believe that “Wall Street asset managers” should make such decisions.
As an old varsity buddy cum investment manager in Wellington told me in the wake of the 1987 share market crash, regarding some clients who’d ignored his warnings, “People don’t react until the blowtorch is applied to the goolies”.
Goolie burning is a nasty business, as Sri Lanka has found out and which deserves its own post. But for the moment let’s note this:
“But the underlying reason for the fall of Sri Lanka is that its leaders fell under the spell of Western green elites peddling organic agriculture and ‘ESG,’ which refers to investments made following supposedly higher Environmental, Social, and Governance criteria. Sri Lanka has a near-perfect ESG score (98) which is higher than Sweden (96) or the United States (51).”
Michael Shellenberger, from his article ‘Green Dogma Behind Fall Of Sri Lanka‘
It’s a tempting idea to kidnap the BlackRock execs and dump them in Sri Lanka where they’ll have, shall we say, direct contact with the joys of near-perfect ESG score. Assholes.
Meanwhile in China….
Because nothing says “Your bank is safe but you can’t get your money out” than encountering a Main Battle Tank blocking the front doors.
Could be worse; in the future they’ll probably be using these instead – and this is not from the well-known firm, Boston Dynamics that pioneered these things: this is a Chinese model.
Woking the dead
A couple of years ago in the wake of the breathless death of George “I stick this gun in your pregnant belly” Floyd, there was a frenzy of statue toppling across America as well as all the mostly peaceful riots.
The statues in question were almost all of Civil War Confederate generals, although the mindless mobs did destroy the statue of at least one Civil War Union hero and slavery abolitionist, and when the MSM mob went after Trump about this he responding by asking the entirely logical question as to when they’d start crashing statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to the ground, since both men had been slave holders. Naturally this was scoffed at and dismissed by the Democrats, their activist hacks and the MSM as an obvious reductio ad absurdum argument.
Except that before the year was out the attacks were happening, at least politically and in the MSM (of course).
It’s steadily escalating and although the Woke Left is now in the process of eating itself alive, as I posted about in Something, something, Ouroboros, and as DPF recently covered, the problem is that the bastards also damage a lot of other stuff on their way to crashing and burning.
Witness what’s happened to the tours of the homes of James Madison…
No American flags fly at Montpelier, Madison’s plantation home in rural Virginia, and not a single display focuses on the life and accomplishments of America’s foremost political philosopher, who created our three-branch federal system of government, wrote the Bill of Rights and the Federalist Papers, and served two terms as president.
… and Thomas Jefferson…:
“The tour guides play ‘besmirchment derby,’ never missing a chance to defame this brilliant, complex man,” Stephen Owen of Enochville, NC, wrote on Facebook.
“People on my tour seemed sad and demoralized,” Jeffrey Tucker, founder of the libertarian Brownstone Institute, told The Post. His guide was “surly and dismissive” about Jefferson’s accomplishments.
I recall that DPF had an enjoyable visit to Monticello a few years back. Looks like he timed it right.
Despite owning no slaves Lincoln will be next – courtesy of none other than these people. Wilkes Booth would be proud of them.
This is far more insidious than smashing a statue; real Year Zero stuff where the Left smashes everything down with the objective of building some Utopia upon the bones and ashes.
What did some famous US President say about this recently? Oh yeah:
Everything Woke turns to shit!
Hairy Maclary goes feral
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Whether as a parent or grandparent, many Kiwis will have read the Hairy Maclary books to children over the last three decades, enjoying the fun of the rhyming language.
There’s also all of Hairy’s friends, Hercules Morse (“as big as a horse”), Slinky Malinki (“Blacker than Black”) and Scarface Claw (“the toughest Tom in town”) among them.
Well guess what sports fans? The American disease of Wokeness continues to arrive here, now with the message that all those characters are not Diverse enough (Equity and Inclusion to be named later):
… a study from Perth in Western Australia has taken aim at several children’s books including Hairy Maclary, suggesting they “perpetuate outdated stereotypes”.
The study by senior childhood researcher Dr Helen Adam of Edith Cowan University looked at several books including …
Critical Theory got its start in literature of course, tearing down everything it could as it “de-constructed” great works from Austen to Tolstoy, so it’s not surprising that they’ve chewed down into children’s books and finally got to the most isolated nation on Earth.
“Oh for goodness sake,” Dodd told RNZ. “I have actually got a female… I’m just looking at the pile of books I’ve got on the table at the moment… I’ve got Susie Fogg [A Dragon In a Wagon] and also, one has to remember that lady dogs have certain times when they’re not supposed to be out gallivanting anyway,” she added.
Woah there! Introducing biology into the argument? That’s a fail right from the start. Clearly Ms. Dodd is not familiar with her Critical opponents, who are turfing biology out the window along with every other “norm” they can.
She’d have been much better off mocking these assholes. Fortunately someone else decided to do the work for her, complete with the picture at the top of the post, with a wonderfully accurate rendition of Hairy in our bold new world. You wanted Diversity? You’ve got it:
With Hercules Morse at the gas and the wheel,
They were all set up now to break in and steal.
With a bang and a crash, they smashed through the glass,
The alarm’s shrill blare meant they had to be fast!
Straight for the till, all nasty and sneery,
Cash into a bag, went Hairy Maclary.
But the whole haul of ciggies of course,
That was the prize for Hercules Morse.
BTW, this isn’t going down well with a small group of the Left; The NZ Left are too busy cancelling Hairy Maclary for woke dogma to help you right now.
Well yes. that’s true. The author is “Bomber” Bradbury, angry as usual that all this woke shite is diverting people away from The Truth Of Marxist Dialectics. But you have to love the self-deception involved there as he headlines his article with a cartoon he’s used several times and which was first created over a decade ago during the GFC.
Identity Politics theory is entirely a construction of the Left over the last fifty years, and the only times I’ve seen the Corporate sector appropriate it has been when outfits like Gillette, Nike, Disney, Hollywood and many others employed it, DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equity) and its bastard child “Woke” to actually attack that portion of their own customer base that is traditional and conservative.
No Minister 