Category: Culture

“F*k Trump” Democrats whine about “Let’s Go Brandon”

To the surprise of no one who lived through the Bush years of “dissent is patriotic” talking point that turned into “dissent is categorically racist and evil” for the 8 years right afterward: Democrats are back to pretending that everyone has to respect the President again.

The meme began when a NASCAR crowd chanting “F*ck Joe Biden” in the background of an interview with an NBC reporter was reframed by that reporter as them sayin “Let’s Go Brandon”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAzaDp6yoQw&t=5s

While it’s possible that this was a sincere mishearing by the reporter, no one believed it to be such and thus the phrase “Let’s Go Brandon” was born as a way to say “Fkk Joe Biden – and also Fkk the corporate press for propagandizing for him”

https://twitter.com/JesseKellyDC/status/1454653834610069507

Democrat responses to the trend have ranged from them clutching their pearls about the “disrespect to the office of the Presidency” (lol) to all forms of incoherent annoyance trying to shame people into not saying or spreading the phrase.

Naturally, this highlighted lots of reminders of Republican president hate throughout history.

The Defiant L’s twitter account has a dozen more and others have been posting many more reminders of contradictory declarations by these political weather-vane frauds for awhile.

While “Buck Fush” was a popular phrase and bumper sticker during the GW Bush years, Republicans had no similar phrase for the Obama administration. Then when Donald Trump was elected into office, no cutsie phrase was invented to mask the hate – “F*ck Trump” was just a popular saying.

Too bad Joe Biden is an old rich white man or this could be smeared as some kind of racist Nazi thing, right?

When it was alleged that a Southwest Pilot ended an intercom greeting to passengers with “Let’s Go Brandon”, the eruption of outraged Democrats on social media was as over the top as one would expect from the party. While a sane reaction would range somewhere on the spectrum between “silly joke, who cares” to “bad move – not appropriate to mix political views and work”, tens of thousands on Facebook and Twitter were Liking and approvingly reposting analysis that this was a call for half of the passengers to die and that the pilot could possibly kill himself by intentionally crashing the plane (lolwut??).

Former FBI agent and current corporate news pundit Asha Rangappa had this thought:

https://twitter.com/AshaRangappa_/status/1454617599854080003

All this is a combination of pre-existing mental disorders and illnesses being amplified by corporate media and leveraged by government as a way to deputize “useful idiots” in the citizenry to support authoritarianism.

An example of the mental illness that is being used by those in power:

And an accurate summary of the philosophy they’re being duped into supporting:

Maher: Afghanistan should wake up the “woke” Left on America (Spoiler: it won’t)

It’s a nice sentiment but if 9/11 didn’t wake up the woke (instead if blossomed fields of woke mobs) then Afghanistans reality is unlikely to click any lightbulbs. Still, he tried. And its commendable since he’s talking against the grain with his audience instead of stroking them in the ways their spoiled sensibilities expect to be massaged by figures like him. 

“We Americans should really get some perspective on where we live,” Bill Maher declares before going into an obligatory 90 seconds dunking on conservatives for being patriotic in order to set the tone and then saying the obvious:

“We’re not the bad guys. Oppression is what we were trying to stop in Afghanistan. We failed, but any immigrant will tell you we’ve largely succeeded here. And yet, the overriding thrust of current ‘woke’ ideology is America is rotten to the core, irredeemably racist from the moment it was founded and so oppressive, sexist and homophobic we can’t find a host for the Oscars or ‘Jeopardy!’”.

“And this is where your new [Afghan] roommates that you took in will prove so valuable because they’ll turn to you and say ‘Have you people lost your fkking minds?!?…

Have you ever heard of honor killings,
public beheadings,
throwing gay men off of roofs,
arranged marriages to minors,
state-sanctioned wife-beating,
female genital mutilation,
marriage by capture?
Because we have.’”

“What’s the lesson of Afghanistan. Maybe it’s that everyone from the giant dorm room b—- session that is the internet should take a good look at what real oppression looks like,” Maher continued. “Ask your maid, ask your Uber driver, ask the Asian woman giving you a massage. … America may not be the country of your faculty lounge and Twitter dreams, but no one here tries to escape by hanging on to an airplane. No, we wait ’til we get inside the plane to fight – and only because they cut off the beverage service.”

PS: The part in the video about Justice John Roberts essentially saying that “the south was ready for the honor system [but they weren’t]” is a reference to a Supreme Court ruling a couple months ago (July 2021) that two provisions of an Arizona voting law that restricted the how ballots can be cast do not violate the Voting Rights Act, because, well – they don’t. At all. Which I explain at length here.

Ed Morrisey further rebutted Maher’s criticism of Conservative patriotism, noting that references to former Speaker Boehner who used to cry at mentions of American opportunity afforded to working class people a lot are as bout as timely as the Macarena, adding:

Maher takes the easy slams on conservatives’ expressive patriotism and the obligatory audience-pleasing shots at Donald Trump — and George Bush, for just criticizing him almost two decades ago — which tend to undercut his own argument on perspective. The Trump lawsuit is much more recent and had to be a legal headache (and certainly is worthy of Maher’s scorn here), but criticism from one of your frequent targets is part of the job, no? And on that score, why bring up Bush in 2021 if you’re arguing for perspective? Why bring up Boehner at all? Couldn’t Maher and his team find an example of excessive patriotic fervor from sometime over the past ten years? If not, maybe that’s not a point worth making.

The same goes for ripping Kristi Noem for riding on a horse to celebrate a major cultural event — the Sturgis rally. Maher didn’t include that as a criticism of her participation in the event during the pandemic, which has been a point of controversy, but merely for holding an American flag while riding the horse. Perhaps that’s overweening patriotism in Maher’s eyes, but even so it hardly equates to the witch-hunt atmosphere that pushed Kevin Hart out of an Oscars hosting gig. To quote the famed philosopher Jules Winnfield, that “ain’t the same f***ing ballpark, it ain’t the same f***ing league, it ain’t even the same f***ing sport.” It’s a rhetorical reach that should have resulted in emergency rotator-cuff surgery for Maher.

But the fact remains that Maher didn’t have to point out that we’re not the bad guys here, and he did anyway. and deserves some kudos at least.

“Super Straight” sexual identification goes viral

Being straight means to be attracted to only members of the opposite sex. With the rise of transexual mainstreaming and acceptance as well as numbers of people going through with the various stages of transitioning their gender, this created a rift because people who identify as straight have different feelings about trans people. This mostly applies to straight men and trans women. A trans woman is a biological male who lives life as a woman. So, depending on how good the surgeries were to transition the male parts into female parts and how feminine the final outcome is, a lot of straight men don’t care that a trans woman they date is really a biological male because “straight” means being attracted to women – not doing a DNA test and then determining from there if you’re attracted to someone or not. Other straight men find that concept ridiculous because they only want to date, have romances with, or have sex with biological females. Both are valid, but with that pre-mentioned rise in trans-acceptance comes the inevitable trans-acceptance bullying. This comes in the form of badgering straight people who don’t want to date biological men and smearing them as bigoted for… er… being straight.

In response… someone sought to clear up the confusion by creating a new label for this group of straight people: Super Straight. A description for straight people who are only interested in members of the opposite sex who are biologically the opposite sex and not just identifying and living life as such. Problem solved, right?

The origin of the term was just a dude named Kyle on TikTok proposing the concept but it resonated with so many straight men who were tired of not being heard or seen in their identification that, to them, straight means “not interested in males [even if you’ve had surgery to hide the most outwardly male parts of you]” that it spread, grew, and was of course condemned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8vQhkPnEE4

In an interview with Insider, he said, “I created it because I was sick of being labeled with very negative terms for having a preference, something I can’t control, and getting labeled by the community that preaches acceptance with that sort of stuff.”

Predictably, activists hated it, he was smeared as a bigot, and had to delete the original TikTok after many thousands of views because the death threats were getting to be too much and too scary. Reddit briefly had a new sub created called “r/SuperStraight” and it was since banned. At the time of this writing, all the search results for “super straight” are articles by woke scold finger waggers explaining why its not okay to say, to be, or to accept as a legitimate sexual preference.

The reaction to him and the concept on all platforms pretty much went like this:

An example that is representative of the common hater-reaciton:

Having a genital preference is okay among the activists – they just say that having a biological-genital preference is not okay. In other words – you’re allowed to be attracted to feminine esthetic, physical features, breasts and vaginas, but if so, you *have to* also be attracted fake breasts and fake vaginas. This is because even thinking of these anatomy parts as “fake” is offensive to trans activism which rests on the dogma that sex is defined by words, not biology. So if a cisgendered woman gets breast implants, its okay to still call those “fake breasts” colloquially, but if you use the term “fake” to refer to a biological male (who identifies as female) and her breast implants, then you are basically de-humanizing her with the reminder of her surgical alteration.

Titania McGrath, a woke-parody account, illustrated the opposition to super-straight in terms of the woke-Left’s take on sexualities:

Blaire White – a trans woman (lookin cute in this video, so evidently I’m not SuperStraight) talks about it here – 

How “Let kids be kids” (instead of sex objects) became a controversial advocacy

“It’s not about homosexuality or heterosexuality. Stop promoting SEXUALITY to our children PERIOD. Let kids be kids.”

^The above text has been shared on facebook by over 14 thousand people over the past 2 days, mostly, I think, because it highlights the inherent absurdity in a practice that is all too commonly celebrated regarding the advocacy and glorification of children being sexually conditioned.

On it’s face, most people would say that’s a bad thing, but if you put it in the context of a pageant where a little girl is wearing bold eye liner, spandex showing lots of leg and upper chest, a big poofy haired wig, and is gyrating wildly for the amusement of a crowd of adults – suddenly for some reason a segment of adults advocate it as adorable and awesome. Likewise, if you put a male child in the same context of a “drag queen” show, where a little boy is wearing bold eye liner, spandex showing lots of leg and upper chest, a big poofy haired wig, and is gyrating wildly for the amusement of a crowd of adults – suddenly for some reason a segment of adults advocate it as empowering and awesome. These people who justify sexualizing kids for their own ideas of what qualifies as entertainment are worth exploring in contrast to the thesis of the meme above.

Recent controversies about touring editions of the “Drag Queen Story Hour”, where the highly sexualized art of males appropriating caricature characteristics of females and feminine sexual allure is performed while reading gender-fluid stories to kids at public library events as part of a larger discussion with the kids promoting growing up to be a gender fluid sex figure themselves, has provoked ire among parents who don’t want their young children socialized into sexual matters while emboldening other parents who are thirsty to virtue signal how open minded and gender-identity-inclusive they are by endorsing and attending the events.

Drag Queen Story Hour

This is an easy issue to rectify by just taking out the sex aspects of burlesque and prostitution signaling that is a part of drag and just make it a fun costume event where the man dressed as a woman isn’t trying so hard to evangelize gender fluidity but instead just exposes kids whom, with their parents encouragement, to the reality that performance and fun is not limited to traditional gender roles and that pretending to be a girl when you are a boy is a thing that exists, whether it appeals to you or not. There will still be parents who find it distasteful and offensive and the parents who have issues wrapped up in traditional societal staples can still fight-the-patriarchy or whatever by putting their kids in the non-sexual reading event without subjecting themselves to legitimate criticism. The fix is so easy in fact, that it begs the question of why these people are so eager to sexually propagandize little kids in the first place…

Then there’s the actual exploitation of a child combined with the sexual propaganda such as the case of a similar recent controversy regarding the use of children as sex objects for the ghoulish pleasure of adults is with the child drag kid known as Desmond Is Amazing. He’s an 11 year old with a spunky personality who likes to feel pretty and sexy dressing up as an adult woman and dancing for adoring crowds – which is a thing thats gonna happen from time to time and isn’t the worst thing a kid could be into, but the public showcasing of him as a sex object is the part that’s drawing criticism.

As LGBTQ+ activists excitedly promote the tenacity they see in many of themselves within young Desmond and view opposition to his drag performances as nothing but unreasonable homophobic small mindedness from haters of any person living outside the conformities of traditional sexual identity roles – this misses the mark entirely as Desmond isn’t opposed personally, it’s his suggestive and burlesque style stripper shows that are being glorified that people are outraged over. It would be one thing if a bunch of nosey haters heard about a childs drag show to friends and family and made it a national spotlight to campaign against but the reality is sort of the opposite: Desmonds Instagram (which a person is supposed to be over 13 years old in order to have, but there is no age verification process on instagram) promoted to his over 100,000 followers a performance he would be making at a Brooklyn gay bar where he did a stripper style dance in a crop top, blond wig, and full face of makeup collecting, also in stripper style, cash tips from the adult men in the audience. (video of another rendition of the same performance)

Desmond Is Amazing at 3 Dollar Bill in Brooklyn. Source: Instagram

While Yelp reviewers were disturbed by the show – no men were reported to have touched the child or shoved the money into his pants like regular-stripper performances – and he was wearing pants (not booty shorts or underwear or anything like that), so there wasn’t any actual abuse – just the simulated sexual portrayal of an 11 year old (or, it was last year, so some sources say he was 10 at the time) but these defense points don’t really go anywhere on a road to justifying it or do really anything at all to the folks who are more inclined to look at something like this and conclude that “Desmond needs saving“.

And while sexualizing a 10 year old girl in tight clothes and makeup for a dance performance at a bar where adults throw money at her wouldn’t be viewed favorably by public consensus and the same for a 10 year old boy doing the same thing – the loophole that is making people endorse Desmond is that he is a gay 10 year old boy dressing up as a girl to dance for an audience of adult men who throw money at him… This sort of performance sure is … different, that’s for certain, and differences from the expected and weird flamboyant boundary pushing performances are a thing that free societies tolerate without much backlash, but when it gets to the point of making highly publicized events out of strip-simulating 10 year olds, it becomes hard to advocate the “push societies arbitrary standards” meme and clouds any legitimate celebration that could be going to a spunky sassy young kid chasing his dream with overwhelming suspicions of why the hell would the adults facilitating and promoting him do it *this* way…

This divide about the way different groups view the sexualization of children adds an unnecessary complication to LGBTQ+ advocacy…

In June 2017, The Advocate, a major LGBT advocacy website and magazine, celebrated Lactacia. The boy has become a celebrity in the LGBT world. Hilton believed he was promoting and celebrating a young boy he considers inspiring to his identity group.

The LGBT world often struggles to separate its sexually explicit culture from its advocacy for equality and rights. In many ways they are incapable of understanding why the outside world would be appalled by explicitly sexual public displays. For them it must be out of malice, hatred, or ignorance rather than reasonable aversion.

Gay pride parades have long been extreme public displays of every form of sexual deviancy imaginable. Gay liberals see no distinction between their sexual selves and their everyday selves. They celebrate the merger of the two as identity and culture

The consequence here is that Hilton and the LGBT world will never be able to fully appreciate the damage being done to a generation of children pushed to grow up faster. The LGBT Left’s intense focus on labeling then exploiting LGBT children holds incredible risk and threatens their futures. Early sexual activity and expression can be devastating to young people, especially LGBT youth. High rates of drug abuse, sexual abuse, and risky sexual behavior are common. HIV rates are extremely high for gay and bisexual young men aged 13 to 24. Nearly 40 percent of homeless youth identify as LGBT, with higher risks of drug use and sex work.

While the LGBT world may not be intentionally trying to harm children or put them at risk, it is time leaders of the movement fully recognize the dangers of using young children to validate their sexual politics. To help further this discussion, we must be careful not to abuse the term “pedophile.” Overuse will diminish the impact of our message and make it more difficult to fight the legitimate scourge of child sexual abuse rampant around the world.

What we must do is call out the dangers of sexualizing children too early, making them vulnerable to people who do wish to exploit and abuse them. LGBT advocacy groups have a responsibility to recognize that every form of sexuality and gender identity can be freely enjoyed by adults in private, but should never involve children regardless of the context or motivation. While they intend to celebrate the uniqueness of the child, they in effect steal the child’s innocence and impose an adult identity onto him, all to validate their own insecurities. We cannot stay quiet and allow more children to lose their childhood to the dreams of progressives who only imagine the future while failing to grasp the trauma they impose in the present.

It all just comes back to the point: heterosexual or homosexual – how bout we just, like, *don’t* sexualize children?…

On the heterosexual cisgender side of child sexploitation that people rationalize into celebrating: while not in recent controversies that are in the news, the people who agree with this “don’t sexualize children” meme would most definitely agree that just as horrifying as the gay and gender-fluid child sexualization examples above are to them, that the “Toddlers in Tiaras” style pageants and competitions are equally horrible mistreatments of children. If you’re unfamiliar with those sorts of things, they do the same as the kids-in-drag style stuff, just with genetic female children instead of genetic-male children dressing like sex doll females.

Source: Pageant Moms and other Scary Things

Cheerleading camps and competitions and dance performances for kids under 12 that feature the same sort of cartoon-whore style makeup and costumes that feature short skirts, booty shorts, and plunging necklines – all things that only exist for the purpose of being visually sexually enticing – on the body of a prepubescent child are just as creepy and wrong to these people. And since “these people” are “most people” – again – why is this a thing that is condoned in any context or any gender?…

That’s probably why the meme above is going around. Repeat:

“It’s not about homosexuality or heterosexuality. Stop promoting SEXUALITY to our children PERIOD. Let kids be kids.”

Honoring funeral procession motorcades is a really nice gesture

I attended a funeral last June and was in one of the cars going to the cemetery. Evidently I have had the luck to have so far, not attended very many funerals (or at least very many where the burial site was driving-distance from the funeral service) – so much so to the point that I didn’t even know the motorcade was a thing. I had only consciously registered it when President Reagan died in 2004 and the motorcade passed near where I was living in Thousand Oaks on its way to the Reagan Library where he would be buried. But as I learned – the body isn’t just delivered and everyone just shows up at the burial but rather is taken from the church to the cemetery by the hearse along with a line of cars – which…is what a motorcade is… am I explaining this poorly? I feel like I’m stumbling over this description and clunky set of recollections which I’m only now live-piecing together.

Point is – when we drove down the main street of town, an older gentleman on the sidewalk stopped and bowed his head and put his hand over his heart until the procession passed and that image stuck with me as such a classy gesture. He presumably didn’t know who was in that hearse, and had no obligation to give it any mind, yet he paused and showed respect – not really to a stranger, but to the strangers loved ones. After all, life is for the living – and funerals aren’t really about “showing respect for the dead” but rather they are gatherings that use that conceit as a way of giving excuse for the surviving friends and family of the deceased to congregate, grieve collectively, and console each other. To have a stranger show the human kindness to other strangers that silently says “I’m sorry for your loss” in such a completely “you didnt have to do that” way is really touching.

What made me think of this story was this post on Facebook in where the same thing happened except the single guy on the street is replaced by a bunch of kids who stopped playing basketball and knelt.

While attending a family funeral the procession passed a group of young boys shooting hoops. Take a look closely. They took a knee not out of disrespect but honor. They was not an adult insight to tell them to stop playing. This meant a great deal to our family. May God bless each one as I feel they will achieve greatness.

“Fearless Girl” statue is an excellent monument to how stupid Feminism is

In lower Manhattan there is a famous bronze statue of a charging bull that symbolizes economic strength and courage during hard times. Seizing on the popularity of Victim Mentality, an opposing statue of a girl staring down the bull with her hands on her hips as her hair and skirt blows in the wind stands across from it was placed across from it to protest Wall Street not having enough women in it or something .

The statue was a Hedge Fund sponsored publicity play (specifically, it was released right before International Women’s Day to call for “more representation of women in corporate boardrooms” – presumably by the boardrooms who are supposedly denying qualified brilliant women to sit on their boards in favor of inferior males because I guess the thesis is that Wall Street dislikes females more than it loves money?), but that hasn’t stopped it from being lauded as a Social Justice icon for the marginalized…or something. I keep saying “or something” only because the purpose and message is so incoherent. A little girl isn’t afraid of economic strength? Why would she be? Or are its supporters praising it because they’re taking it more literally and seeing it as “girls don’t need to be afraid of giant menacing things that are about to kill them”? It just doesn’t make any sense.

But that vague incoherence is a key factor on why it’s receiving praise of course – the more minimalist the canvas, the easier it is for the audience to fill in the gaps with their own confirmation bias and ideology. It’s only the suckers like me who actually apply objective logic to the constant themes among the differing interpretations that ruin any chance of appreciating this publicity stunt as any kind of meaningful art.

The history of the bulls presence is a lot more interesting than the story of the Fearless Girl. Sculptor Arturo Di Modica, an Italian immigrant, just made the thing without direction or permit with $350,000 of his own money used to cast the 7,100 lb bronze bull and just dropped it off in front of the New York Stock Exchange in December 1989 as a gesture to lift the spirits of American traders after the stock crash of a few years earlier. That’s a uniquely American story of positivity, where as the addition of this girl staring down the bull is multi-levels of nonsense victim propaganda.

Nicole Gelinas points out that the support by the mayor of the city only sets a dangerous precedent:

That’s because the mayor has set an arbitrary precedent — this statue can stay because I like its politics — that’ll be used against the city in court. What if Black Lives Matter protesters want a statue of police brutalizing a black man in front of One Police Plaza?

But the bigger problem with Fearless Girl is that it casts stereotypes in bronze: Men do important things, and women get in the way.

The bull is the primary actor: He is charging. The girl’s job is to impede him. This is how Wall Street has long worked — and it’s changing, but slowly.

Take the management committee of State Street’s parent company. Of its 14 members, two are women. One, the chief administrative officer, is a top regulatory official. The other is the human-resources chief and “citizenship officer.”

On Goldman Sachs’ 33-member management committee, five of our women — at least four of whom are in similar, growth-restraining positions.

Yes, growth-restraining: These are great jobs and require deep skill. But they’re bureaucratic rather than entrepreneurial. If a department head — a man — wants to start up a new unit, it’s the regulatory experts who will say, no, you can’t.

Similarly, a trading head may want to hire someone — but the human-resources chief nixes it.

Indeed, the area of “compliance” — which sounds like an S&M activity but has to do with ensuring that the bank and its employees don’t launder money, steal or do other bad things — is where women have done well.

Di Modica is rightfully annoyed by the addition of the girl to his art piece, and while he is being mocked for noting that it violates his rights as an artist – he’s obviously correct. The addition of the girl is akin to that SNL skin where then Mayor Rudy Guiliani says that he will stop graffiti not by removing it from the city but by adding the word “sucks” after peoples nicknames. That’s all this dumb girl statue is: piggybacking on someone else’s art (a MANS art, no less – real feminist message there…) to flip the original message into a new and negative one. That’s a jerk move.

Slate’s Christina Cauterucci elaborates:

Before Fearless Girl came on the scene, the bull was an encouraging representation of a booming economy. Now, charging toward a tiny human, it’s a stand-in for the gendered forces that work against women’s success in the workplace. This isn’t the same kind of contextual shift that might result from a curator’s juxtaposition of two works; the girl is derivative. Di Modica meant his bull to stand alone—now, it’s as if Visbal and New York City have made a solo piece a diptych without his consent.

A diptych is a a painting on two hinged wooden panels that may be closed like a book, and that’s exactly what has happened.

So much for Artists’ rights though: Mayor Bill de Blasio has already extended the permit to allow Fearless Girl to remain on display until next year. Last week he tweeted a link to a Newsweek story about Di Modica’s complaints with a message suggesting any rejection of Fearless Girl was misogynist:

This idiotic strawman of course feeds exactly into the Victim Propaganda message that looks past any examination of logic about the message and boils it down to the most basic of false premise’s: that women are oppressed and hated and persecuted for “taking up space”. At the time of this writing, 42 thousand people Liked that Tweet and over 20 thousand retweeted it – presumably non-ironically. That makes tens of thousands of people who sincerely believe this insane premise.

In the New York Times, Ginia Bellafante points out the elitism at play via the False Feminism of Fearless Girl

Corporate feminism operates with the singular goal of aiding and abetting a universe of mothers who tuck their daughters in at night whispering, “Someday, honey, you can lead the emerging markets and sovereign debt team at Citigroup, and then become a director at Yahoo.” The point of “Fearless Girl” was to advertise a State Street initiative pushing companies to include more women on their boards. Although the firm has said it is working to improve the number of female executives in its own ranks, it hasn’t been close to exemplary in this regard: Of its 28-person leadership team, only five are women, according to the company website.

Gavin McInnes puts it’s more bluntly: The statue only proves that feminists are dumb…

Why Gretchen Carlson is probably going to hell

Former Fox News host Gretchen Carlson settled a sexual harassment lawsuit with the network for $20 Million over a single comment she decided she didn’t like and a nebulous tone with her morning show co-host she found to be displeasing to her. The lawsuit cost the networks founder and Chief Executive Officer Roger Ailes, the accused party by Carlsons lawsuit, to have to resign from his position and the company.

Getty images

Gretchen Carlson seems like a nice Christian woman so it is my hope that there is more to this story that for some reason her and her lawyers decided to keep secret from their public filings because otherwise she is a horrible human being that almost surely is going to hell. Whatever anyone thinks of Fox News or of Roger Ailes and regardless of whether he is a nice guy or a jerk (I have no idea so I have no non-profession-related opinion on him), his deposition from the network he built over Carlsons stated accusation is a reprehensible mortal sin and extreme miscarriage of social justice.

When I first heard of the lawsuit I erroneously assumed that Carlson was alleging something that actually happened… Nope… The lawsuit makes no claim of Carlson being touched, sexually propositioned, or harassed in any way whatsoever. This made it odd that she received $20 Million in a settlement of a “sexual harassment” lawsuit when no harassment, sexual or otherwise, was even alleged. Instead, the allegation in the lawsuit that falsely masquerade as being of “sexual harassment” (bringing shame to her and her lawyers for cheapening the serious charge and term) is just one big conspiracy theory based on one alleged inappropriate comment her boss Roger Ailes allegedly made, one alleged time, 9 months before her contract wasn’t renewed at Fox…

The single comment in question was Ailes allegedly saying to her “I think you and I should have had a sexual relationship a long time ago and then you’d be good and better and I’d be good and better.” That’s it. and that ain’t harassment. That comment might be rude, it’s almost surely not wise, and it might even be wildly inappropriate – but it ain’t “harassment”, it isn’t a demand or threat, and it for damn sure isn’t worth $2 let alone $20 million. To think otherwise, you have to believe that that sentence is so damaging to ones ears and psychological stability that they would pay 20 million dollars in order to not have it said towards them. Since no one anywhere, ever would ever think that – Carlsons pay day becomes not a vindication of an abused woman who wouldn’t take crap from a lecherous corporate jerk abusing his power but rather a scam that ruined someones livelihood for the personal gain and obscene enrichment of an individual who wasn’t harmed and suffered no damages to justify such a payout. Don’t Christians believe that to be a sin?…

Of course, Carlson didn’t bring the lawsuit over that one sentence alone – she claimed the lawsuit was justified because her contract with Fox News Channel was not renewed this past June and she says that lack of renewal was because of Aile’s comment and the implications she drew from it (evidently only 9 months later and not at the time) that she was fired. She doesn’t specify exactly what implication she drew from the alleged comment but presumably she interpreted “we should have had a sexual relationship years ago” to mean “if you don’t have sex with me, I will fire you in 9 months if your ratings do poorly”. Or maybe “even if your ratings AREN’T a huge disappointment to the network”?. Idk. But a good way to avoid the gray area in this situation would have been for Ailes to have not made the comment and for Carlson to have been a better on-air Talent because then the contract renewal wouldn’t have poor ratings or a verbalized sentiment that “we should have boned back in the day” as the culprit.

Unfortunately for Carlsons eternal soul, the evidence supports the Roger Ailes side and depicts her to be a vindictive greedy lying liar. Ailes claims that she was let go because her “disappointingly low ratings were dragging down the afternoon lineup” and that the lawsuit was just petty retaliation for FNC not taking on her drag. Carlson claims that her ratings were great and the real reason she was fired was in retaliation for rebuffing her boss’ sexual advances.

Okay then… lets examine those claims…

RATINGS
Carlsons lawsuit claims that she was fired from FNC despite her show doing well in the ratings in contrast to Ailes saying that her ratings were “disappointing”. The reality? Her ratings were in fact disappointing. Her show, The Real Story, didn’t completely flop by every standard – just by the standards of the network she was employed by – i.e. – her shows performance disappointing. My personal take on it was that it was one of the weakest most dull pieces of programming that Fox News had to offer, but my opinion doesn’t matter – the collective’s does. Well, SURPRISE – the collective agreed with me: Gretchen Carlsons show trailed nearly all of Fox News Channels other programming. Carlson tried to spin this as a good thing because the time slot improved over last year, but so did all of cable news because it is an election year. Also don’t forget the part where regardless of the time slot improving along with the rest of the network and the rest of all cable news – her show remained one of the least watched shows on the whole network… Fox is held to a higher standard with its #1 position in the cable wars and it shouldn’t be a surprise when the weakest link is excised from the chain. Further, Carlson didn’t just lose to her above-average performers at her own network, but she actually lost to the competition. “CNN Newsroom with Brooke Baldwin” beat “The Real Story” by 2% in the eminently important 25 to 54-year-old demographic in June (the month Carlson was not renewed).

SEXUAL HARASSMENT
As stated above, Gretchen Carlson filed her lawsuit over losing a show that was one of the worst rated on her network and lost to the competition in the key financial demo due to a conspiracy theory and unspecified tone of not being appreciated (she claims, because she is a woman). Her entire case against Ailes was the “we should have had a sexual relationship years ago” line that she found so wildly distasteful and offensive that she… continued working for him, thanked him in her book for all he’s done for her, and wrote him hand written notes with smiley faces thanking him for his support and asking to be put on the air in prime time more – which Ailes granted her, presumably without any sexual requirements.

Gretchen Carlson further alleges that her co-host Steve Doocy wasn’t nice to her, or something. In what sounds like an entitled 7th graders attempt to get a teacher to reprimand a boy she doesn’t think is giving her the attention she deserves, Carlson alleges her Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy of “attempting to put her in her place by refusing to accept and treat her as an intelligent and insightful female journalist rather than a blond female prop.” Notice there is no actual allegation – just nebulous whining with no example to support the claim whatsoever. Not even a single quote of Steve Doocy ever saying anything that would even hint at anything resembling the sentiment she alleges (“blonde female prop” are her and her lawyers words, not anything Doocy is alleged to have ever said. Sounds like a personal self-worth issue to me). Just a completely irresponsible unsupported smear.

If Carlson really thought that Roger Ailes was demanding that she have sex with him to keep her job, why did she stay at that job? If Carlson thought that her cohost Steve Doocy didn’t respect her then why didn’t she ever bring it up with him? and if she thought that she was being treated in a sexist fashion towards Doocy off-air, why did she think it was okay to treat him in a sexist fashion ON-air, including the time she made small-penis and erectile dysfunction jokes about him in a segment on Fox & Friends in where she surprise gifted him “Turkish Viagra”?

CONCLUSION (HOW SHE GOT AWAY WITH IT)
Given the evidence, and lack thereof of anything being alleged, you might be asking “how the hell did this phony get away with a $20 million settlement and why did Roger Ailes have to leave his position at the network in seeming disgrace?”…

Because of the bad press and damage to the company. I’ll once again note the possibility that an internal investigation found something improper that Carlson didn’t even allege in her legal filings and by pure coincidence Ailes got caught Al Capone style in this mess and deserved the outsting – but from the available public evidence, it merely looks like Gretchen Carlson complained publicly and loudly (and legally) about things entirely un-complaint-worthy (as evidenced by her own action at the time and afterward) and put the company in a situation where they had to either suffer millions of dollars worth of bad publicity in an election year when everything else is otherwise going great only to spend tens of millions in a legal battle that some idiot judge might actually award against them anyway – OR – usher Ailes out and pay off Carlson $20million for no reason other than she blackmailed the company for it. Remember: she alleges no harassment, no physical contact, no improper solicitation, and no evidence to support unjustified non-renewal of her crappy show on the network. Her accusations amount entirely to (paraphrasing) “Roger Ailes [whom I had a great relationship with, was friendly with, wrote hand written smiley notes to, and publicly thanked for giving me great opportunities] said a crass remark one time and then 9 months later when my show lost to the competing one on CNN in the ratings and did so poorly that it drug down the rest of the shows around me, my contract wasn’t renewed. Also, another on-air talent, Steve Doocey, didn’t appear to respect me very much. Give me $20 million dollars because I’m a victim now”.

People, me included, typically think that if a settlement like that takes place and the person in question resigned from their position, they must have been wildly guilty – and i’m shamed to even add the caveat (unsupported by any current evidence available) that that may be exactly the case for all I know – because “where there’s smoke, there’s fire”.

Know where there’s also allegedly a lot of fire? In hell, where vindictive liars who make tens of millions of dollars off of fabricating grievances to assassinate peoples characters and end their careers in revenge for their own professional failures.

Video: Mean parents won’t let adorable child keep a dead fish as a toy

As ridiculously cute as this viral video is, it kindov hurts my feelings to watch.
This kid went fishing and is so fascinated by one of the fish that he wants to keep it as a toy. That part is hilarious, but I found it heartbreaking to watch him unravel as he sees himself losing the appeal and not understanding why.

Obviously this had to be milked for at least a little while by the adults for the comedy gold, and I totally support that, but I wish they would have then explained a better reason for the “no” verdict on why he can’t put the dead fish in his toy box and keep it as a toy. My fantasy version of this is that after the camera was turned off, he got a full scientific explanation of the decomposition of organic matter to make him understand that the cool thing he’s holding now will not stay that way, making him accept through realization that he’s not being arbitrarily denied a reasonable request but rather that his intentions are simply unfeasible.

DAMN DANIEL is the best thing to happen to the internet in ages…

Zero percent irony. I like it and approve of it and am happy for these dudes.

If you’re late to the party: this string of snapchats of a dude commenting on his friend Daniels style (twice with white Vans) somehow caught fire and is now millions of views strong, half a million likes and re-tweets and it’s all beautifully wonderous. Here it is:

https://twitter.com/josholzz/status/699432086965366784

Enjoy the remixes…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXYsHiTwJjo

4 Superbowl 2016 Lowlights

OMFG! I’m so excited for this years Superbowl football team competition game!!! jk. I know nothing about the teams or even the sport and would say I am unable to care less except for the fact that I know I hope the ponies win over the kitties cuz everyone is telling me the kitties are gonna take it, so I’m betting on TeamHorse. I intend to spend the time focusing on things that actually matter and peeking my head into the Grand Hall every once in awhile when Wheeler yells that commercials are on but anything else I catch will be noted.

UPDATE: Didn’t do much as far as life-blogging the event cuz it bored me to tears so badly but go me for betting on the winners. Now here are 5 losing moments from it all:

1- National Anthem Butchery
The American National Anthem should be sung up-tempo at a brisk pace without dramatic change to the inflection of the words. Why is this formula so abhorrent to musical blowhards? Lady Gaga is more talented and has better style than the silly hair and glitter suit with matching eyelids she wore while underperforming the anthem in that drawn out goofy style. Talented singers should be using the opportunity to showcase the anthem, not their spin on it. I like the idea of a Lady Gaga style rendition of the anthem delivered in a Gaga style costume and get-up, but not this style and not this get-up. I disapproved.

2- The Black-Power Halftime Show


For historians looking back at this post, I should note that this is written in the year 2016 in America, the least oppressive, most opportunity-giving country to minorities of all kinds on the planet. Beyonce went of the deep end with a literal “black power” performance. The “literal” addition is necessary to note that it’s not a disconnected observer tsk-tsk-ing something they don’t understand in some by-gone time of cultural bubble commentating but rather an information exposed internet-connected time where the ridiculous pandering to the lowest common denominator of by-gone segregations are being bizarrely glorified. Having such a whine-fest of supposed victimhood of an entire race of people, 60 years after any law allowing any kind of government allowable suppression of a race in the midst of a black-skinned presidents 2nd term in office is so small minded and counter-productive to unity, tolerance, and general acceptance that it is the kind of thing that deserves scorn and ridicule, not celebration at such a big event. Idk what the people who approved this display where thinking. It doesn’t help anything to re-inforce victim mindedness through an empowerment message when there is no racial oppression of any significance to overcome. Be empowered because you’re a person in a free society, not because you’re a black person in a white society. Get with the times, you dummies.

#Beyoncé Super Bowl performance yesterday. #DoubleStandard#BlackPantherparty#SuperBowl50

Posted by Johnathan Gentry on Monday, February 8, 2016

3- Absent: Good Commercials. Present: Dumb Attacks on them
The only thing I watch during this event and I already forgot them all. The only ones I remember are from tangential stories about them like the monkey baby thing allegedly being a tongue twister (i have no problem saying it) and the abortion rights group NARAL getting mad at the Doritos commercial that “humanized” a human fetus. I’m fine with people choosing abortion if their pregnancy has negative affects on their Doritos or other snack chip supply but it it’s more than a little-bit-completely stupid of an argument that developing human babies shouldn’t be humanized just because it makes you feel better about snipping it outta you, should you want to. Funny that humanizing animals is encouraged but humanizing human babies – omgz! noez!

4- Ponies Beat the Kitties
Everyone told me the cat team was going to ride the horse team to an easy win so evidently this was a big upset. Good.