Category: News

The problems with (and cover up for) rushed mass mail-in voting

President Trump has expressed concern about states, particularly the key election states of Michigan and Nevada, changing their voting rules this election year to shift to mail-in voting in the name of safety because of the Wuhan Coronavirus.

Increased mail-in voting increases potential for fraud, so naturally this should be a bipartisan issue, right? You would think the Democratic party might have an interest in protecting Democracy and specifically – the citizens rights to have their vote counted and not illegally cancelled out by a fraudulent tally. But no… the Democrat party and its partisan defenders take the opposite position and ridicule the concern in the first place.

Straw-manning the issue

The first tactic to ridiculing a point with merit to it is to remove the merit and argue against an alternate dumber version of the argument in a technique known as the Strawman Fallacy.

While Trump has been rightfully suspicious of the fast track attempt to use mass mail-in voting as the standard for this years election, Trump critics bashing him on this strawman his position into “any vote by mail is bad” which is a much easier position (that he never took) to tear down, especially since military votes are by mail and Trump himself votes absentee ballots. This technique was used to roast the President as a hypocrite by media who made no attempt to give readers a glimpse into what the actual concern expressed is or might be.

CNN’s Chris Cillizza summed up this dumb non-point on a CNN.com article (which is notable because it would be one thing if a journalist displayed this level of lack-of-journalism on their blog or social media profile but to do so on their platform of alleged journalism only validates via illustration, Trumps claim that CNN is Fake News):

President Donald Trump made very clear that voting by mail — an alternative many are suggesting to deal with the ongoing stay-at-home directives — is a very bad thing. And more than that, he suggested, it’s deeply corrupt.”No, mail ballots, they cheat,” said Trump. “OK, people cheat. Mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country because they are cheaters.”

You might have noticed that Trump is not terribly thorough and precise with every sentence that casually references another that he’s said in that moment or the week prior when he speaks off the cuff to an audience that knows (or he thinks knows) what he’s talking about (like supporters at a rally or members of the press) and this makes for easy attack points by dishonest media critics to just isolate those moments instead of doing that journalism thingy where they aggregate the facts on the topic together and report them in a way to inform the people of the Presidents position. Instead, these corporate press outlets pluck these moments out of any further explanatory context and rebut the literalness of those isolated phrases rather than the collective explanation. The above quotes are not the only comments the President has said, yet Cilizza uses those and those alone to dishonestly summarize his position. With the false premise that “Trump thinks no one should ever vote by mail”, the premise is set for the “gotchya”. In reality, the lines above were spoken, as I noted, in reference to his previous comments on the subject regarding hastily expanded mass mail-in voting and Trump made the mistake of mentioning it in a press conference where he assumed the reporters attending would have been good enough at their jobs to know the subject matter.

Nah. Instead of referencing the larger issue, a reporter was all “uhhm, didn’t you just recently vote by mail?” and Trump was all “Duh. Yea. You can do that in Florida and I was in the White House so I voted absentee” and the reporter was like “how do you reconcile that?” and Trump was like “Wtf b*ch”. *(Paraphrased / not a real transcript).

Cilizza used the actual back and forth, where the reporter actually did say “How do you reconcile that” and Trump said he was in the White House, probably not even catching on that the reporter was trying to trap him and thought she was just being stupid, and then called it “obvious hypocrisy” instead of the non-contradictory reality it is. The lying title of that Cilizza article, btw, is “Donald Trump’s blatant hypocrisy on voting by mail” even though only an approximate 26 lines of the post (including the “how do you reconcile that?” transcript) are dedicated to that false premise and 56 lines afterward acknowledging the higher propensity of mail-in fraud, but making excuses for it as not a big enough deal to do anything about…

The problem with mail-in fraud

Cilizza gets to the point that “The problem is that Trump thinks absentee voting is good for him but not for other people. Because of, er, fraud.” – which again, is false. Trump never said or implied anything about the current absentee voting system in place – his comments were only about rushed state wide mass mail-in voting – but Cilizza can’t just be out there writing posts like “Trump is right about this issue” – so first came the false “lol what a hypocrite” thesis that headlined the post, and then buried underneath comes the acknowledgement of the issue at hand:

Now, what Trump is right about is that absentee voting and vote-by-mail have been the places in the recent past where the small amount of voter fraud that exists has been discovered. (Nota bene: The only difference, effectively, between absentee voting and vote-by-mail is that in the former you have to request a ballot while in the latter a ballot is sent to you.)

Yea… doy…

The concern is, again, not that registered voters who mail in their ballots are currently doing a bad thing, but that a new policy automatically mailing ballots to millions of people that didn’t ask for them, comes with the obvious potential of mailing voter fraud opportunities. Without a thorough review to do this right, you’re potentially sending millions of ballots to people who don’t exist or are ineligible voters.

For such a policy to avoid this obvious loophole for election theft, the voter rolls would have to undergo a re-indexing to update the Governments inefficient system of doing seemingly simple tasks it manages to fail at like keeping track of people who moved, are registered in multiple states by accident or on purpose, who have died or have been convicted of a felony that makes them ineligible to cast a vote.

Trying to make the non-controversial a controversy

Situations like this where journalists want to editorially slant a message but not completely bald-faced-lie about it entirely do so by couching the truth they don’t want focused on in a swarm of “yea, but still”. Again – I’m picking on CNN’s Chris Cilizza here, but only because his article on the subject was so exemplary of the others who did the exact same thing in the same way. In his pre-mentioned article he admits to national mail-in fraud but when talking about specific examples, makes sure they are only ones that are obscure, hyper-local, and from a long time ago, such as one in the Democratic primaries for local offices like sheriff in “the late 1990s” (couldn’t give an exact year, bro? “1997” is in both the top of the article and its URL…), quoting from what “The New York Times wrote back then“:

“Many of the absentee voters were assisted in voting by supporters of various candidates after claiming that they could not read (sometimes despite high school or college degrees) or that they suffered from physical maladies (one saying he had been kicked in the head by a mule).”

More recently than the “the late 90s”/1997, in “the early aught-tens” (2012), a piece published by the New York Times titled “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises”.

The NYT caption on this photo reads: “An absentee ballot in Florida. Almost 2 percent of mailed ballots are rejected, double the rate for in-person voting.”
-Credit… Sarah Beth Glicksteen for The New York Times

The Times article reports that election administrators say that just the increasing trend of more people choosing to vote by mail “will probably result in more uncounted votes, and it increases the potential for fraud”, noting in particular that voting by mail contains “vastly more prevalent” fraud than the in-person voting fraud that most media attention surrounds. Despite being from 2012, it offers more pertinent historical record highlights than CNN-Cilizza’s 1997 Georgia sheriff primary example, such as:

In Florida, absentee-ballot scandals seem to arrive like clockwork around election time. Before this year’s primary, for example, a woman in Hialeah was charged with forging an elderly voter’s signature, a felony, and possessing 31 completed absentee ballots, 29 more than allowed under a local law.

The flaws of absentee voting raise questions about the most elementary promises of democracy. “The right to have one’s vote counted is as important as the act of voting itself,” Justice Paul H. Anderson of the Minnesota Supreme Court wrote while considering disputed absentee ballots in the close 2008 Senate election between Al Franken and Norm Coleman.

Voting by mail is now common enough and problematic enough that election experts say there have been multiple elections in which no one can say with confidence which candidate was the deserved winner.

Which is exactly Trumps stated concern that Cilizza and other Trump critics are trying to dismiss. One has to wonder why that might be…

Vox writer Aaron Rupar responded to this with the headline “Trump isn’t even trying to hide his self-interested reasons for opposing mail-in voting” with the byline quoting Trump saying “For whatever reason, [it] doesn’t work out well for Republicans”, calling that an example of President Trump “saying the quiet part loud” when it comes to his opposition to mail-in voting. The reality is just the opposite: disproportionate Democrat votes in increased mail-in ballots than exist in the rest of the voting tallies suggests evidence to exactly Trumps concern about fraud.

In that same Vox piece, Rupar totally makes stuff up about to boost mail-in voting by claiming Trump totally makes stuff up to discredit mail-in voting:

However, Marc Thiessen writing in the Washington Post that, Trump’s concern about mail-in ballots is completely legitimate brings further examples, not the least of which being that:

A bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former president Jimmy Carter and former secretary of state James A. Baker III, concluded in 2005 that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud” and that “vote buying schemes are far more difficult to detect when citizens vote by mail.” Carter and Baker also pointed out that citizens who vote at nursing homes “are more susceptible to pressure, overt and subtle, or to intimidation.” In Florida, there is even a name for this: “granny farming.”

Thiessen also notes items of consequence that the higher rates of mail-in ballots not even being counted are undisputed.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study found that in the 2008 presidential election, 7.6 million of 35.5 million mail-in ballots requested were not counted because they never reached voters or were rejected for irregularities. That is a failure rate of more than 21 percent. In 2008, it did not matter because the election was not particularly close and mail-in ballots only accounted for a fraction of votes cast. But imagine the impact that would have in a close election in which mail-in voting is tried on a massive scale.

Again: more than a tiny bit suspicious that so called “Democrats” would be downplaying these known threats to democracy, no?

As admitted by Cilizza (again – in his article that calls Trumps absentee voting “hypocritical”), Thiessen also cites the difference between absentee votes and a state-wide change to mass mail voting:

Moreover, there is a huge difference between sending ballots to a small number of citizens who request them and requiring that they be mailed to every registered voter, as Democrats are demanding. Under the Democrats’ plan, ballots would inevitably be sent to wrong addresses or inactive voters, putting millions of blank ballots into circulation — an invitation for fraud. Add to that the danger of what Democrats call “community ballot collection” (a.k.a. “ballot harvesting”) where campaign workers collect absentee ballots in bulk and deliver them to election officials, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Seems more like the validation of Trumps concern about a rushed change of plans to enact state-wide mail-in voting this election year is far from controversial – it’s nearly universally agreed upon by data published and opined in the same sources that are attacking this concern (NY Times, WashPo, CNN, just to name the 3 quoted in this post by me).

Know who else agrees? Chris Cilizza…

In the same article mentioned several times in this post – the one dubiously calling Trump a hypocrite in the title and claiming that voter fraud shouldn’t be a concern, Chris Cilizza says the same thing as Trump. Specifically that:

So, there’s no question that past history has suggested that absentee balloting and vote-by-mail are more likely than in-person voting to be subject to bad actors. Which makes sense since the vote is being cast, usually, in the privacy of your home, as opposed to at a polling place with official poll watchers and election officials not only keeping an eye out for any irregularities but also taking the ballot from you as soon as you cast it.

-Chris Cilizza, CNN

Which, again:

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Lockdown Propaganda is making people insane

Specifically: The mainstream media coverage of the Wuhan coronavirus and its editorializing of its severity and effects vs the severity and effects of local and federal governments reaction to it, is making people act irrationally hysterical, panicked, and without critical thinking. But “insane” is a shorter and accurate summary (that is not an attack on those actually afflicted with cognitive illnesses).

Recording his show from his back yard, Bill Maher tries to talk some sense into his viewers on the subject.

“Now that we’re starting to see some hope in all this, don’t hope-shame me” is the bizarre but necessary plea someone in the logical position on this issue at this time faces from the unwashed masses.

“You know the problem with nonstop gloom and doom is it gives Trump the chance to play the optimist. And optimists tend to win American elections.”

As I’ve noted before about the bizarre “Trump was too optimistic” attacks – the anti-Trump doomsday media is only helping his re-election. Maybe it’s a secret conspiracy to manipulate media consumers with a little Bugs Bunny style reverse-psychology but that still makes it my duty to tip you off about it in the event that you don’t want to be one of those manipulated tools aiding the Donald Show into a Season 2 renewal.

Maher cited FDR’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” which has been a winning inspirational theme for him and politicians after him, most famously “the other 3 letter president”, JFK. Maher doesn’t fear the Chinese virus so much as he fears that “as s*** as he is, I can see Trump riding that into a second term. And then there will be no hope left for you to shame.”

I selfishly assume that one of his writers must have heard me point out the “early seasons of Nickelodeons Rugrats cinematography” technique fearmongers are using to make a micro organism appear visually scary by showing the scrubbing broccoli ball image. As Maher put it: anything “you magnify a thousand times” looks scary, and illustrate the point with a micro-zoomed image of a pubic hair.

Update (May 14th): Dave Portnoy’s take

The CEO of Barstool Sports had a similar thesis with slightly different words.

Update (May 27th): Another good one from Maher

Why Apple products have limited color options

Apples design choices amount to “we are whatever the other guys aren’t”.

That’s a line I say a little further down in this post but I wanted to do that thing where a pull-quote is used to demonstrate a thesis cuz that’s what real journalism is, or something.

The logo for their September product announcement event appears to be a stack of clear colored plastic shells.

So does this mean they are bringing back color – or, sorry, “flavor” – options to their computers like the early 2000’s iMac and iBook options?

I’m gonna say that will be a solid no because Apples design choices amount to “we are whatever the other guys aren’t”.

So the first Apple computer debut’s as a beige square and later a beige monitor with a beige tower connected to it and their first laptops came in off-white and then off-black (or what Apple today calls “Space Gray”) – but then when every desktop maker offered nothing but a beige tower or black laptop, they come out with “flavors” of computers that include color options that are bright and zesty and intentionally absent of white, off-white, beige/tan/whatever available choices in desktop and black options for laptops taken away.

But then when the other computer makers catch up and start making fun looking colorful desktop and laptop options, Apple says “fkk-you” and makes all their machines in unpainted uniform aluminum.

The same with iPhones: They were black when most cell phones were silver, became silver when most cell phones started copying the black iPhone, and expanded into colorful options only after the industry standard for smart phones were “either silver or black”.

Apple is what the others aren’t – or at least that’s how the company wants people to think of their products. So what they offer is shaped by what the standard is and then Apple will go do the opposite. 

Stealing from some because you “want things” for others makes you a bad person

Just a friendly reminder to well meaning philosophers with such big hearts that they become generous with other peoples money: I’m not scolding you, I’m just pointing out that desires for the well being of others doesn’t lift your moral credentials and taking from people makes you worse, not better.

The inspo for this Public Service Announcement stems from this proclamation shared with me on social media that wags a digital finger at people who point out what many think is obvious – that advocating theft from people makes you a bad person (even if it’s for reasons you think are noble redistributions) – but an increasing number of people think is virtuous:

“Wanting everyone to have healthcare and food does not make you a communist, socialist or unpatriotic. It just makes you a good person.”

That is almost mostly true. Accuracy rating of 20% to a maximum of 49%.

Wanting vs Doing

Wanting good things for people makes you nothing but just a sort-of “nice” person in an abstract theoretical way, because of course, “wanting” things can’t make you good any more than wanting to be healthy makes you lose weight or wanting to be bilingual makes you fluent in Bengali. To be those types of persons you have to do things, not “want” them.

In the past couple years from the time of this writing, a trope has cropped up in social media punditry that mocks and derides people saying that they are extending “thoughts and prayers” in the wake of something terrible happening instead of doing something more tangible to help the people you are proclaiming to psychically benefit by thinking things and mentally saying things about the poor state of affairs that has befallen them. I’m inclined to agree with the philosophy when used in the context of “instead of virtue signally a broadcast about your compassion and empathy, you should do something about it by donating, volunteering, or one-on-one helping an affected person”. But that usually only applies to contexts of natural disasters and most commonly the anti-thoughts&prayers trope is most commonly used by authoritarians in response to murders committed with guns in the context of “instead of ‘thoughts and prayers’ why aren’t you supporting more government legislation to curtail law-obeyers 2nd amendment rights in ways that wouldn’t have prevented this act of evil that you’re broadcasting ‘thoughts and prayers’ about??”. Either way, the point is the same that you can “wish” and “want” all you want but “wanting” others to be aided isn’t helping any individual lives.

Back to the meme: Wanting people to have their health cared for and to be able to eat is a great thing to want. What makes you a communist, socialist, or unpatriotic bad person is when you take steps to initiate violence (support for state force) in order to confiscate/steal other people’s representation of their labor (their money) in order to fulfill your utopian “wants” instead of use your own capital and non violently convince others to voluntarily do the same for the same purpose.

Anti-Choice is Anti-Good

You might think it’s the best thing to give $100 of your money to a homeless shelter while I might think it’s the best thing to give $100 of my money to St Jude’s Hospital and the only thing you can do to get my $100 away from kids with cancer and toward your adults without a place to live is to convince me with logical or emotional or rational appeals.

As soon as you say “I want this thing to exist, thus my want overrules your wants, so I support the use of force to take what is yours to go towards the things I want”, you are an unpatriotic bad person.

Whether you prefer communism or socialism as your preferred method of State control is your own business.

Adam Corolla shows why Being a Boss to Millennials Sucks

A significant portion of the August 29th 2019 episode of The Adam Carolla Show podcast’s first half recently featured a beef with his employees about them not doing a seemingly simple task over a period of many-asks by the boss that resulted in an on-air rant, then questioning, and then one of the mentioned employees of said rant, Dylan Wrenn, getting on the microphone to angrily tell Adam that if he thinks Dylan is so “stupid” then to “fkking fire him”.

Boss Carolla seemingly just wants an office in the recording studio warehouse cleaned… why is that so impossible? Why is it a subject that has to be avoided so many times to cause this on-air confrontation? These are not rhetorical questions. Please someone answer them for me because I am as baffled as Carolla is in this segment of his show and I’m positive that many, if not a majority of listeners are sympathetic to the employee side of the conflict – so tell me – enlighten me on what exactly is going on under the surface here that makes Carolla’s “please clean this office – during normal hours [not overtime or getting there early or anything extra]” so offensive?

Before continuing, skip into the first 5 minutes of the show and listen up until the 48 minute mark by either looking the episode up (I play all podcasts at 2x speed so that would be my choice, but few others seem to like that option) or by listening via this link here.

The only premise you need is that Adam Carolla, the host, is the boss. Co-hosts Bald Bryan and Gina Grad are the male and female voices that open the show and then later on, defending his colleague Dylon is Chris “Maxapada” as he is nicknamed on the show (his real last name is Laxamana). Please listen first.

Now, my “WTF is wrong with kids these days” questions that I have [about people who are my age or within 10 years of age]…

Why is there so much animosity toward doing things?

Adam brings up a previous angry employee, Gabe, who was angry at being told to clean an office used by 2 other people and asks why it is so offensive to do more than 33% of the organization within a shared space. I ask this as well… As Adam notes in the show – it is possible for one to expand up to 40 or 50% you know, adding that “you’re allowed to walk down the street and pick up a wrapper that’s not from YOUR candy bar”. So why is this concept so offensive to this generation? Obviously if there is a pattern of one person always doing extra cleaning of others carelessly created messes, that would be an injustice that I’m positive Adam and anyone else would recognize, but wtf is the deal with being pre-emptively angry over the possibility of being victimized in that way, before even performing the requested task? Maxapada points out that Adam has trained him to rinse coffee mugs that people leave out around the studio there half full with coffee even if they aren’t his and Adam says “I would say, look its not your coffee mug that’s sitting on the sink half full with coffee but if you’ve been here for 2 hours, you could give it a rinse” as cohost Gina Grad chimes in noting that “It’s your office” and Adam continues that he’s not asking anyone to do anything that he doesn’t do all day and that when you have kids – that’s your whole life is picking up things someone else puts down. So WTF is the problem here? I get that you don’t want to be a parent to your co-workers but that’s where the mentality of “no one act like a child” comes in and then no one is mommying anyone else or a group of manchildren – they’re just keeping communal spaces clean and tidy. Why is that so wrong?

What is up with this need to be praised by the boss?

Adam asks “is Dylon pissed? what is he upset about?” and Maxapada says that Adam is being too hard on Dylon about the whole office thing. So Adam asks “what is the hard part, on me?”, prompting an appropriate giggle from Gina Grad (lol) as a clunky way of asking essentially “what am I being unreasonably hard on my people here about?” and Maxapada says that Dylon “does a lot of hard work for the show and just doesn’t organize his office” – the implication being that if you do good work at the place you work, then any aspect where your negligence causes a problem should be overlooked and unspoken because you are competently/expertly/ wonderfully/whatever-ly doing your job elsewhere… THIS. MAKES. NO. SENSE… if you think it does then please enlighten me on what duh-moment I’m missing here, because that enlightenment wasn’t provided when this was brought up on the show.

Adam accepts the premise of what Maxapada is saying and challenges it by asking “So he works hard for the show… and you don’t work hard and Brian doesn’t work hard and I don’t work hard or everyone works hard?” to which I was squirming in my chair begging for an answer to exactly that logical extension because I’m desperate to understand the thinking behind the person who says such a thing.

I remember the feeling of anger and shame in a sense of being attacked for not doing something I was told when I was 6 or 7-ish and thinking that the oppression I was experiencing was unjustified just because I am me and I’m so awesome and great and I made the Richardland brand based on entirely that little-kid-with-only-child-syndrome premise to mock and satirize it but now when I see it exhibited and defended with righteous indignation by adults, I just don’t know WTF is going on… Adam again accepts the premise completely and asks “he works hard for the show. Alright. What’s that have to do with not cleaning his office?”

I now ask you, the reader and listener who agree’s with the employee after hearing the rant – what is the answer to that question??

Why is your motivation based on being told how awesome you are instead of DOING A GOOD JOB?…

Maxapada’s response is about morale at the studio being low “with all this office cleaning [talk & nagging]”, prompting the no-duh response question from Adam of “how do we resolve this office cleaning [issue that you’re affected by]?” because these employees seem to be entirely oblivious to the infinite loop of disaster they’re causing themselves by:

1- Not doing a thing asked of them,

2- Thereby guaranteeing and necessitating it coming up as an issue repeatedly in the future,

3- Continuing to not-doing the thing asked of them, this time with the reason that their morale is low because they’re getting nagged about the Thing-they-won’t-do so much…

Dude… I swear on a stack of Bibles that I’m legitimately seeking an answer on the genuine perspective of this mentality: what is the Adam Carolla position in this equation supposed to do/say/react with exactly? The only thing I can think of is exactly the thing that Carolla thought of, which is that if a persons morale is low – maybe they need to take some time off and come back refreshed. Cuz that’s what you would do with someone whose work you typically like but are having a problem with that they are attributing to low morale. This is where Dylon got on the microphone and gave the opposite of a “you can’t fire me, I quit!” declaration and instead said “Fire me!”. His reasoning is, again, that he’s being personally attacked. Raising the question:

Why are you taking the criticism of your refusal to do a task at work as a personal attack?

I have had this exact exchange with several people in various capacities throughout my pirate ship business career where I say that I am experiencing frustration at their lack of doing a thing I asked them to and their response is an abstract posture about the thesis of what I’m saying actually being that I think they are “[fill in the blank with things I never said about them]”. With the Carolla crew, it went down like this:

Dylon: “I’m confused because if you do think I’m as fkking lazy and atrophied and stupid as you think I am, then FIRE ME!”

Adam: “Okay, would you *like* to be fired?”

Dylon: “I would like to have a job here where my work is respected and people don’t scream at me on air for a fkkin radar cord that I didn’t put on your shelf, but FIRE ME if you think I’m this STUPID.”

Adam: Okay well, let’s take some time off and we’ll figure out the rest. If you’d like that….

And then Dylon left and presumably packed up and quit. Carolla continued upon Dylons departure from the microphone, saying:

Adam: First off… I don’t think I’m screaming at anybody – I think i’ve made my opinion pretty clear that I would like the office cleaned…you may not have taken the radar cord and wrapped it up with the jump rope – that may be the OTHER person I asked to clean the office – but its still in your office that’s not being cleaned so thus I can’t find it… What am I confused about here? Other than ‘morale is low’, what is the – Bryan – what would your take on this be?”

Bryan adds a quasi correction that while he didn’t hear Carolla talk about the subject earlier that day or whenever this incident occurred that was frustrating him, that Carolla did refer to himself as being “animated” in his frustrations about the office being cleaned (so in other words he’s saying that while Carolla isn’t “screaming” on air and doesn’t sound like he was screaming off the air, he wasn’t “not screaming” about it either) and that Bryan thinks it’s justified to be annoyed.

So Carolla asks the peanut gallery at large, “what part of this is me being unreasonable?” and asks the shows announcer Mike Dawson. Dawson says “I don’t think you’re being unreasonable” and Carolla asks “I’d like the office cleaned…why can’t Dylon clean the office he works out of” – because this is literally the only place to go with this subject… You’re asking for something to be done as a boss and a person is saying they won’t do it or just aren’t doing it, so the questions is “what is unreasonable about this ask?” and SOME-one needs to step up and answer exactly that.

How is the work you do seemingly unappreciated by the Boss just pointing out that which you repeatedly refuse-to-do that is causing a problem?

Adam asks “how does ‘organize your office’ factor into me not thinking you do work?” – yet another struggle I’ve frequently asked my crew members when faced with exactly this premise.

Maxapada’s response is “The only thing we hear a lot of the time from you – I’m not saying that you need to compliment us all the time – but its a lot of complaining – I know that’s Kindov your thing too – but it’s just, we hear a lot of why you’re upset with us”

To which I was audibly yelling at my phone the answer the Adam responded with himself saying “don’t you think if you cleaned the office around the 35th time I asked you to do it, it would help step towards that goal? What about never doing what I’m asking you to do? Don’t you think that interrupts the Praise Pipeline?” 

Results

Dylon was previously given the opportunity to question and counter Charlie Kirk, the Conservative Republican founder of Turning Points USA

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.”

Former eBay and DreamWorks executives start odd new digital tv service

While at a business meeting in Dallas with rich people looking for interesting ways to invest their money, I was asked if I knew Meg Whitman. Not knew of her – but like, knew her personally, because, quote, “she’s big in computers and technology in California” and I should “talk to her about some of the stuff yer doing”. So 1- I’ll have my secretary Rosa schedule a lunch with her right away on a day that I’m free and 2- for as dense as that comment was, it gave way to discovery of a completely and totally bizarre new company that she’s now the CEO of…

Katzenberg & Whitman at the helm…

Background/Catchup: Meg Whitman is the former CEO of eBay from back when eBay was one of the 5 biggest websites that existed on a brand new world wide web. More recently she was the CEO of HP where she was… okay. Not revolutionary or as successful as she was in the booming years of eBay but the general review of her tenure at HP appears to be mostly positive, just not exciting.

Jeffrey Katzenberg is the former head of Disney animation when it too was the king in its field, doing its best work of all time (Little Mermaid, Beauty & the Beast, Aladdin, Lion King) and then founded DreamWorks in 1994 to challenge Disney when he felt disrespected by the company.

Together they are launching a digital/streaming video service.
/End of “who are these people?” catchup section…

Quibi: a bite-sized video network

The new company is called Quibi and I don’t know how to pronounce it any more than you do but I’m assuming it’s “Kwibbi” and if so – they should have just spelled it that way instead. If its “Kibbi” then the phonetic spelling with the “K” is, again, superior. And if its pronounced “Quee-bee” then that’s just ill advised all together.

Update: I’ve been informed that it is short for “quick bite” and pronounced as such.

The branding…

Oh, and also its logo is a weird circle with a tail and the company name uses an ugly generic font that doesn’t at all match the style, but other than that it sounds…like something.

The logo isn’t the worst, but it sure is odd. It’s primary colors are pink and blue that smash together with a diagnal gradient purple belt on a “Q” that is really a perfect machine-cut pineapple ring looking “O” that leaves the crisp circle to make an organic looking curl like a pugs tail, to make it a “Q”.

What is known about Quibi so far…

Strange name, strange logo, and it’s a venture of the strangest of people to partner together on something like this, plus the biggest players in Hollywood, $1.5 Billion in capital behind it, and all servicing what sounds like the dumbest way to do, market and contract something like this that I could imagine…

The “thing that’s different” about the platform is that the videos on it will be made short and for cell phone consumption. Specifically, they’re 10 minute long videos and the service wants to debut with 5,000 of those (so about 833 hours of content – which is a lot to start with when its all-new creations starting brands no one has ever heard of on a platform no one has ever heard of).

What makes sense about it..

This makes sense as a venture because Instagram stories and the lengthier Instagram TV videos are getting huge marketshare of watch-hours and before those two existed, it was SnapChat doing the same thing that was the reason Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, even thought to make that a feature. SnapChat’s Discover page contains not only short, several minute human interest stories, news coverage, and YouTube style talk show/vlog clips from partners but also from SnapChats own production arm that makes mostly news talk related videos from a Left-wing/Democratic point of view on politics and culture.

So, making a platform specifically geared toward this market makes sense when 2 competing tech companies are themselves scrambling to tack on this exact feature to their existing user services the same way Apple is now doing with Hollywood style content in its Apple TV+ service launching later this year.

In other words – like I’ve been telling my business partners for a damn decade and a half: creating a useful service to attract a lot of users is great and all, but the real way to leverage that gathering of humans is to keep them within your ecosystem with entertaining stuff to watch.

What doesn’t make sense about it

Quibi won’t have that benefit of being a service that’s tacked onto something that already exists and is popular with a lot of people, so it’s going to have to attract those people to its content based on the merits of its offerings alone.

The company is getting around this problem by signing on big names and studios to make new shows for it.

The Content

Steven Spielberg, the famous Producer/Director and a longtime friend of Katzenburg’s, is going to write scary stories for Quibi. Can he write 10 minute scripts as good as he Directs 2 hour long movies? We’ll find out.

The major studios, including AT&T’s WarnerMedia and Katzenburgs former boss turned rival turned partner, The Walt Disney Co. and its recently purchased subsidiary, 21st Century Fox, along with smaller Indie studios including Lionsgate will be creating original content for the service.

Quibi’s Business Details

Don’t let the bite-sized video fool you into thinking this is a low-budget venture though. Whitman says they’re not building Quibi to be another YouTube – they want it to be more like another HBO. Their budget backs up the claim as the videos they’re making are expected to cost $100,000 a minute to produce, according to the LA Times, which is about 30x what most producers spend on similarly short length content made to be consumed on smartphones.

The deals Quibi is making with these content creators are the most competitive I’ve seen. Quibi pays for 100% of the cost of the productions, but doesn’t own them afterward – they’re merely sponsoring the content creation just so they can license it exclusively for 7 years. After that, they have no claim to it and the creating studios can do with them what they please on their own streaming services or whatever they want. After two years of the agreement, the deal allows for the creating studios to expand their shows from the 10 minute “bits” to full-length tv-episode 20minute+ durations to shop around for distribution elsewhere like networks or other streaming offerings. 

The funding for all this content is coming out of over what will probably be around $2 Billion raised by big name funding players Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. (the bank), and the Alibaba Group (Alibaba is a huge Chinese e-commerce company that is often described as being “the Amazon.com of China”). They’ve already raised $1Billion for content creation and $500,000 for the technical build the app and service will require.

The Absolutely Terrible / DealBreaker…

It ain’t free… Quibi will be a paid service. Exclusively. No free version.

If you want access to its library of 10 minute videos to watch on your phone, you’ll have to pay $5 a month and still have to watch ads, or pay $8 a month without ads. Maybe there’s a game changer that makes their content so “must see” that it justifies these price points, but at this stage, that doesn’t appear likely despite the investments and participation of such big content making sources on the platform.

Put me on record as noting that this is a bad idea.

What they should have done instead…

1- Absolutely make it a free service. Especially since all of the content offering is going to be made by other billion dollar production corporations who get to keep the distribution rights of what they’re making on Quibi’s dime, the deals with those studios should be more favorable to the Quibi user base who is essentially test-screening show concepts for those studios and paying for the pleasure. They should get it for free, with minimal ads courtesy of those big studios – not regular-amount-of-ads + a subscription fee because of those big studios. Keep the option to upgrade to an ad-free option, but don’t wall the whole thing off as a premium service exclusively. That’s not smart unless you have some really powerful hooks that haven’t been announced yet.

Examples would be bite-sized episodes from intellectual property the public is already familiar with – eg: Disney making a Star Wars animated series similar to their 2003 Clone Wars series that aired on Cartoon Network in small 2 minute long episodes (stitched together and shown below), NBCUniversal doing the same thing with a Minions series and other properties they own like The Secret Life of Pets, Despicable Me, and so on with characters who are much better suited to inhabit 10 minute stories than hour+ long movies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpXrz2Sfv8Y

Instead of banking on familiar franchises spawning new short-format spin-offs and supplementing that main push with original entertainment ventures, they’re doing the reverse (if pre-existing franchise IP even comes to the platform at all).

2- Incorporate Influencers & New Talent.

Quibi doesn’t want to be YouTube because no one wants to be YouTube, including YouTube – we get it. Big Studio production is where the money is. They want to be a premium outlet just like everyone else. Fine. But getting people to pay a monthly fee for content they don’t know anything about is risky and unnecessarily so when you could mitigate that risk by adding personalities who already have followings to your platform with enticing deals that encourage them to stay there and maybe even leave YouTube all together some day.

The high-production-value aspect Quibi is going for is fun and fine and good luck to them with it – but it should be supplemented by a tier of millennial up & comers from social media, now boosted with big fat Hollywood budgets to do extensions of what they’ve been doing themselves from their bedrooms and whatnot.

YouTube Red failed because no one wants to see “their favorite YouTube stars in low budget Hollywood style movies” – they want to see their favorite YouTube stars doing more and better versions of what they already know and like those stars for doing. They don’t want to see PewDePie in a romantic comedy – they want to see PewDePie play video games and comment on news or whatever he does. Thus, a PewDePie YouTube Red late night style talk show format where he has a monologue, interview, and variety-show-esque segment could have been a big draw – but YouTube wasn’t interested. YouTube didn’t understand that YouTube fans don’t want to see Logan Paul in a horror movie (which YouTube Red tried to do with “The Thinning”) – they want to see Logan Paul do goofy heightened-reality silly-douche stuff. And so on.

A free version with lots of new stars empowered to do their own thing with minimal constraints on a platform that entices you to upgrade to a premium version without ads and with more content seems so obvious to me as the way to go here that it will be interesting to see what Quibi actually turns out to be and whether it is successful or flops.

Developing…

Apple TV+ Announcement is Apple’s most uninspired ever

The March 2019 Apple event announced 3 things:

Apple Card
a credit card with no fees and the sort of spending tracking that a dozen other apps offer. It’s a partnership with Goldman Sachs and MasterCard.

Apple Arcade
a paid subscription service (price not announced) that gives you an all-you-can-eat style access to a list of premium and paid games on the app store.

Apple News+
a subscription service for digital versions of newspapers and magazines.

and…

The Big Announcement!: An unexciting mainstream version of what is already available to consumers with no advantageous features or innovation

Apple TV+

The main attraction! And what is it?… It’s an app.

It contains Apple Channels which does what Amazon Channels service and Hulu both do. But now its by Apple!

This is like how early DVD’s would try to stretch out their non-existent “Special Features” with checks like “chapter selection” and “dolby digital audio”

In addition to the ability to buy channels through Apple, there will also be original programming at a subscription price that was conspicuously absent from the event… Whatever that price is, will it be worth it? Here’s what we were given to make that determination:

The Original Programming on the debut of Apple TV+ is a snooze-fest

The shows in this announcement are nothing special. That doesn’t mean any of them will be bad – it just means they’re not exciting.

Stephen Spielberg’s Amazing Stories… basically another Twilight Zone style anthology “but with SPIELBERG!”…

The Morning Show… A Comedy(?) or Drama(?) or Both about a Morning Show… Reese Witherspoon & Jennifer Aniston & Steve Carell do a show about a morning talk show. No clues as to what kind of show it is except the painfully unfunny “oh, hey guys, am I late??” bit that ushered in Steve Carell to the presentation stage after Aniston and Witherspoon had said a few words about their involvement in the series. That clue suggests that the show is a comedy but who the hell knows. There was no detail about it. We don’t know if this is going to be a goofy reboot along the lines of Back To You (a show that barely lasted 1 season, literally no one knows about, and I’m only mentioning here because I kindasorta almost got a speaking role on it) or if they are going for more of an Alan Sorkin tone like HBO’s The Newsroom. Probably the latter, but only because that’s a safer route to take and Apples other lineup items look equally bland and pedestrian.

Something about Immigrants… I guess its a docu-series? The Indian fella from HBO’s Silicon Valley (Kumail Nanjiani) introduced it but what exactly his role in the series is wasn’t made clear. I guess he hosts explorations into immigrant-centric human interest tales or something? Whatever it is – this was the peak of his career as his dramatically lighted face recieved equal billing with Spielberg, Anniston/Witherspoon, Big Bird, and frigginOprah, so good for him at least even if the show looks uninteresting.

A Sesame Street Spinoff… This segment was so horrible and so indicative of everything wrong with this event that I had to spin it off into its own post about how awful it was…

A Science Fiction drama about blind people… Jason Mamoa stars in series that is a new spin on the essential concept of “A Quiet Place” in where a tribe of people live in a dystopian future where a handicap is the central driving plot contrivance.

Little Voice… I have no idea what this is but director J.J. Abrams pitched it alongside a singer-songwriter I’m not familiar with named Sara Bareilles. Are you excited yet?

2 Oprah Documentaries… one about sexual harassment, and one about I-already-forgot-cuz-no-one-cares.

Any of these sound like must-see-TV to you?…

The entire Event was among Apple’s most dull ever

Product announcement events for tech companies aren’t expected to be entertainment. Except Apple’s. They decidedly are supposed to be exactly that.

How terribly, painfully, cringe-ily ironic that *this* – an announcement of a video entertainment service – of all Apple’s events, would be it’s most boring.

Chris Evans and Michelle Dockery, who will star in the limited series Defending Jacob, that wasn’t even talked about at the event (or if it was, it was so brief a mention that I didn’t notice), sum up the excitement level of the event perfectly in this GIF:

the face you make when you’re contractually obligated to be someplace that suuuuuuuuuucks...

^That’s at an applause moment, mind you… and they look like they’re at a school assembly having to humor a motivational anti-drugs speaker who is doing zero to change your opinion but you don’t want to make it any more awkward than it already is.

It didn’t need to be like this…

The absolute bone dryness of this event was an unforced error. At Apples 2017 product announcement event, they kicked off with a cold-open presentation of a funny, fast paced, inventive, high-budget comedy sketch depicting how civilization would collapse without any apps. It was legitimately entertaining, fast paced, and took some risks in the places it was willing to go to dredge for comedy in just a short little bit that was exciting and made people want to watch again and show other people who didn’t see it.

That event announced the new/upcoming iPhone X, an Apple Watch with cellular connectivity, and the Apple TV box finally getting 4K capability.

So… if Apple kicked off a presentation of routine hardware upgrades with a such a high-end, high-concept, pizazzy video, you can only imagine what kind of epic excitement stirrer they cooked up for an event that announces their streaming Hollywood style video service… except you can’t imagine it… because you would never in a hundred thousand years guess that this trillion dollar company entering the entertainment video space would ever ever ever make such a bizarrely wooden, nerdy, socially awkward, WTF choice of an opening for such a release…

This Apple event opened with… I kid you not… a slideshow… (which is bad enough, but hold on – it gets so much worse) that led a discussion of CEO Tim Cook lecturing about what a “Service” is… conceptually, and philosophically….

Apple… What. The Motherkking. Fkk. AreYouDoing??

Sociopath Democrats want MORE years of jail time for non-violent crime

On the heels of President Trump passing criminal justice reform, freeing thousands of non-violent criminals from unfair lives of imprisonment, Democrats are calling for MORE caging of non-violent offenders of laws that only the ruling class thinks are that important.

President Trumps former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted of avoiding taxes in an illegal way, and for that, he is going to be locked in a cage for 3.9 years. Democrats, instead of calling this sentencing for the unreasonable exercise of government power that it is, are calling it ‘disrespectful,’ ‘lenient,’ ‘an outrage’.

Paul Manaforts mug shot in front of a prison-orange superimposed background and behind superimposed jail bars. Source: TalkingPointsMemo.com illustration of an AP article about the Mueller probe that was formed to find “Russian Collusion” in the Trump campaign, which is a hoax that never happened, and thus needed to find some other peoples lives to ruin so it didn’t look quite so feckless and insane as it actually is.

Specifically, Manafort was convicted last August on eight felony counts, including filing false tax returns, failure to register foreign bank accounts and, related to that non-registration maneuver – bank fraud. So basically, he tried to keep more of his money than the State wanted to confiscate from him, got caught, and now has to spend several years of his life in a cell.

The headline to the NBC News post I linked to above has as its byline the commentary of one unnamed observer saying “If you rob a bank you’re going to spend twice as long in prison as someone who steals millions otherwise,” – completely ignoring that bank robberies involve the threat of death and violence to abscond with money, but more importantly – the fact that Manafort didn’t steal from anyone, he just didn’t “comply with the law” that dictates how much the government can steal from him. This is the sort of thing that could be both fixed and punished by a fine – but the sadistic opposition doesn’t want to enforce a law or see a financial deficit filled – they want people associated with Donald Trump to suffer.

Appreciate the gravity of that totalitarianism: This person is going to spend years in a cage – not because he took what wasn’t his – but because he kept what was his. Cool…

Jurors deadlocked on 10 other counts they tried to snag him with, and Investigator Mueller eventually agreed to not retry those charges as part of the plea bargain stuck with prosecutors.

The state could have sentenced the 69-year old Manafort to up to 24 years in federal prison, so the 3+ years he will get now was a let down to those licking their chops to see him thrown away longer. How can elected servants of the people justify such a ghoulish desire for harsher punishment of people who didn’t physically or even financially endanger anyone? Just tack-on some sort of Social Justice meme to the case of course…

Conjuring imagery to illustrate the divide between street crime and financial impropriety crime, Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said on Twitter “Crimes committed in an office building should be treated as seriously as crimes committed on a street corner”, but how does she know Manafort was in an office building when he failed to inform the state about money he had in certain bank accounts? Because she’s trying to make the ludicrous claim that assaults, robberies, and murders are morally the same as not paying as much taxes and the government wants you to, without sounding precisely as ludicrous as that actually is of course.

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez follows the same goofy logic, tweeting that Manafort somehow bought his way into “only” spending almost 4 years of his life in federal prison…

The dishonesty of this comparison of course bypasses the reality that people with low incomes, by definition aren’t getting large portions of that income stolen by the government and thus don’t commit the crimes of “bank fraud” to evade that theft. Rather, people of low income who receive higher prison sentences aren’t results of a judge looking at their yearly earnings and giving longer sentences to lower earners nor is their sentencing a result of not having enough money to buy a bunch of fancy lawyers to argue in a more articulate way for lighter jail time. People typically get longer prison sentences for having lots of prior convictions, usually that involve violence or the threat of violence. If they can’t control themselves to the degree that they are repeatedly caught by the state harming or threatening to harm other citizens, then yea – they get typically harsher time in punitive cages. If Cortez wanted to be honest about such a comparison, she would have compared Manafort to other first-time-offenders with no violence or threats of violence in their crime, but then she wouldnt have an excuse to call his sentencing “light”, nor have an excuse to rally her supporters about an alleged injustice that they need people like her to advocate against, so… truth goes out the window for dishonest emotional appeals while 70 year old men sit in prison for not surrendering enough of their money to the State.

Cool.

Brietbart.com went mainstream and forgot its punk rock roots

Andrew Breitbart was a merry prankster who challenged political correctness and the worst aspects of Leftist censorship, control, and bully culture with bold assaults and humor and did so in ways no one else was even trying – specifically – without being a doctrinaire right wing hack like Bill Buckley, an obsequious establishment partisan like Sean Hannity, or a moralizing religious zealot like much of talk radio. Instead he was fresh and funny and most importantly: not very political. He was political in the sense of challenging power and clowning on powerful members of the State infringing on rights. He wasn’t against same sex marriage and wasn’t a vicious school marm of a scold on issues regarding sex or cultural influence and involvement of marginalized groups of americans – which up until him was basically the cost of admission for any right-of-center political figure who combatted the dogma of big government shackles on individual liberties of speech, self-protection, and finance.

Former Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay social commentator, agitator, admitted provocateur, and impressario, is the only figure who comes close to Andrew Breitbarts legacy of lampooning, trolling, and seriously discussing deep issues that force thought from different perspective amidst the other storms of chaos and mischief towards orthodox traditions of both political norms that they create and instigate.

And yet Breitbart.com abandoned him a year ago when he was attacked for joking and otherwise making light of his own experience as a victim of sexual predation by an older man. While Breitbart didn’t fire him or completely throw him under the bus and Milo left to save them the hassle of increasingly uncomfortable defenses of him that almost certainly would have culminated in a request that he leave, the publication still didn’t do anything to protect one of their own from the character assassination he experienced, and that was a severe error for their position politically, let alone the moral implications of not protecting “one of the family”.

Milo wrote on Instagram (one of the last media platforms that allows him after Twitter and Patreon banned him) under a screenshot of a Breitbart story headlining how Mitt Romney is a RINO or something boring and mainstream-conservative-safezone as it gets, a pretty excellent summation of my feelings towards the Breitbart that was vs the Breitbart that is vs the Breitbart that could have been. Milo’s commentary:

New year, new start! On reflection, and with a heavy heart, I’ve deleted Breitbart from my bookmarks. I loved my time there and I’d return in a heartbeat, but, without me, the team there has simply forgotten how to be interesting, and without Steve, they’ve lost their fighting spirit. There’s just nothing that grabs my attention on the site any more.

When I was at Breitbart, we defined the culture. We were the epicenter of exciting, rebellious countercultural thought. We crushed campus feminism, defended the heroes of Gamergate, threw bombs into campus safe spaces, named and shamed abusive Leftist bullies, published dissident gay editorials, christened new movements… and it was FUNNY and a joy to read.

But what are the writers I hired and trained doing now? Where’s the energy gone? Now the site is spineless and boring, chasing after other, more interesting people six months after everyone else has already covered them—and betraying, denying, disavowing and unpersoning its former stars.

What a waste…