The JD Vance couch thing is a totally invented and arguably slanderous shitpost and I'm gobsmacked that the guy I've been hearing all day is Mr. Midwest Decency would pull it out at his introductory rally https://t.co/5MFJul2sZx

— Andrew Egger (@EggerDC) August 6, 2024

Who needs a platform when you’ve got social media fabrications, right?

The real danger to democracy is in letting the bottom quintile control the narrative on everything and in everybody being too chicken to avoid pandering to the intellectually challenged crowd.

The goal is to hoodwink us into voting for a dude who is a far-left extremist, holding views that most of the people in this country find too radical:

In 2023, Kamala Harris’ running mate Tim Walz supported and the Minnesota legislature passed the following legislation:

— All limits on abortion at any stage of pregnancy were repealed, as were laws requiring doctors to treat infants born alive after an abortion. References to “women” in the new laws were replaced with “pregnant people”.

— Minnesota declared itself a “refuge” for transgender surgeries and therapies for minors. Gender surgery will now to be publicly funded.

— Public and charter schools are mandated to teach “ethnic studies,” and school boards are instructed to adopt “antiracist” curricula and teach “the history of the genocide of Indigenous Peoples.”

— Drivers’ licenses and state-funded health care are now available for illegal immigrants.

— Private religious colleges are forbidden to “require a faith statement” from enrolling students.

— Convicted felons now have the right to vote before completing parole or probation.

Minnesota’s Lurch to the Hard Left

This is way scarier than “Project 2025” but the media will cover for Harris and Walz, gaslighting us with a lie that they are moderate.

#BREAKING: Rep. Cori Bush was projected to lose her primary in Missouri in the latest blow to the progressive “squad” on Capitol Hill, according to Decision Desk HQ.https://t.co/iAitVl6CON

— The Hill (@thehill) August 7, 2024

I was just thinking about Cori Bush yesterday when I was driving on a highway in Missouri – my first time driving on a highway since the injury – and there was this very bumpy stretch of the road over which there stood a billboard saying, “Cori Bush voted against fixing this road.”

I found that to be a very effective political ad.

It’s good she’s been primaried.

So do you know the new term for layoffs?

Subtractive change.

And if you are against layoffs or eliminating tenure lines, that means you are “guilty of systemic bias against subtractive change.”

This terminology was invented in academia, so it will take a little bit of time to become widespread.

Austerity has found a new disguise.

I chose Operation Jacknap as my true-crime read of the year because it inspired Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s wonderful novel Long Island Compromise. I’m really glad I read it because Teich’s story, set in 1974, could have happened last week, it’s so contemporary.

Teich, a successful Jewish businessman, was kidnapped by an anti-semitic, Palestine-loving, anti-capitalist proto-BLMster.  It was called something else back then but all the slogans are identical. The kidnapper kept screeching about “fascist capitalists” and claiming that he couldn’t find justice in the legal system of the US because he felt persecuted for being black. Then, as now, proto-BLMsters fell in love with totalitarian dictatorships and wrote bad poetry to justify their Jew-hatred.

What’s different is that back then the FBI was on the side of the victims. Today, they would have probably tried to jail Teich for tempting the kidnapper into brutalizing him or being a white supremacist by identifying a black criminal.

This stupid game keeps getting replayed, and we can’t get out of this cycle. One can’t be fully American, it seems, without being deeply attached to the race issue, and I know I’ll never be able to get interested.

Francisco Pizarro won the battle of Cajamarca with a troop of 180 bedraggled men fighting in a climate alien to their bodies against 80,000 fierce, battle-tested Incas fresh from their massive victories in a civil war.

Your quote is in no way related to your question given that this population reduction isn’t “troop losses.” It’s refugees. Mostly women and children. The overwhelming majority of them want to come back, as real refugees (as opposed to migrants) tend to do. What did you think, that these are all men who died in battle or something?

Let’s be cool, collected, focused and determined like Pizarro, and we’ll all win at our individual Cajamarca.

The idea that from debating Biden Trump should seamlessly slide into debating Kamala is very characteristic of the Democrat understanding of human beings. Everybody is fungible. Everybody is just a bowling pin painted a certain color.

This incessant sabotage of Ukraine has been a hallmark of the Biden administration:

My god, this is so sick – Biden's behavior is so sick.

At the beginning of the summer, Ukraine lost the opportunity to destroy a large number of russian Su-34s due to the US position on the prohibition of striking with American long-range weapons on the territory of the russian… pic.twitter.com/1vAQ1zewUh

— Jürgen Nauditt 🇩🇪🇺🇦 (@jurgen_nauditt) August 6, 2024

Kamala is far-left, so if she’s elected, it’s going to get worse.

I deeply detest Democrats for their lies and gaslighting regarding Ukraine. They have betrayed us at every turn.

Last year, Klara chose a pastel-colored backpack with fluffy teddy-bears hanging on it. This year, I suggested something similar and was greeted with, “I’m in third grade, Mom. This is for babies.”

To which I obviously replied, “Mommy to you, young lady, and we’ll revisit this on your 16th birthday.”

She chose an elegant black number with not a sparkle on it. It’s like they grow a mile every year.

It wasn’t just the opening that sucked bullets. Many things at these Olympics have gone wrong. Athletes are housed in miserable conditions that have prompted at least one of them to sleep in the park:

The cardboard beds have been a huge point of contention for the athletes in Paris, with many complaining they’re too hard and not conducive to a good night’s sleep. The beds are designed to be environmentally friendly and can be re-used after the Games, but the athletes hate them.

https://au.sports.yahoo.com/olympics-embarrassment-gold-medallist-spotted-sleeping-in-park-as-athletes-fall-ill-after-seine-swim

I hope the beds are reused to make the entire organizing committee sleep on them for a month.

One more thing about the book I just finished, then.

A great writer who creates literature differs from an OK author who provides entertainment in that she doesn’t try to soothe the readers’ anxieties by providing forced happy endings or explanations. An artist doesn’t speak to an audience. She’s in conversation with God, and audiences can listen in if they want.

Emma Cline’s The Guest is a wonderful example of a writer who is confident enough not to provide convenient explanations for why Alex is such a self-defeating layabout. Cline is not interested in how readers handle the anxiety they feel when faced with an eruption of chaos into daily life.

Taffy Brodesser-Ackner is talented but nowhere on the level of Emma Cline just yet. This is why she does provide an explanation for her characters’ dysfunction. To do that, she uses a real-life kidnapping of a rich Jewish businessman (with his consent) and turns a similar kidnapping into the root cause of her characters’ failure at life.

The kidnapping in question was that of Jack Teich in 1974. Brodesser-Ackner knows Teich and his family, and she recognizes in the Afterword that they did not experience anything remotely like the unraveling that her characters did. 1970s were a different era, and people simply didn’t know that it was OK to become a total wreck because your father was kidnapped before you were born.

The enormous difference between life and fiction in no way detracts from the quality of Brodesser-Ackner’s book. It’s a great novel, although definitely not everybody’s cup of tea.