Category Archives: Media Criticism

Oakland

has been occupied:

True, the Occupy Oakland general strike was not entirely violent. Throughout most of the day occupiers only terrorized shoppers, destroyed private property, and shut down commerce at the Port of Oakland. The real mayhem didn’t begin until protesters occupied an abandoned building near San Pablo Avenue and 17th Street. The occupiers erected barricades using tires, pallets, and garbage cans and set them on fire when riot police began evicting them from the building. An all-out battle followed with police using tear gas, flash grenades, and bean bag rounds on the occupiers, and the occupiers responding with firecrackers and bottles.

By 12:30 AM, the occupiers had been removed from the building and retreated to their home base at Frank Ogawa Plaza. Despite all the damage and mayhem they have caused, the liberal leaders of Oakland only want to embrace the movement further. The Oakland City Council will take up a resolution today supporting the Occupy encampment and calling on city administrators to “collaborate with protesters.” The resolution is expected to pass over the objection of Council President Larry Reid. “We’ve given up control of the city” to the occupiers, Reid said. “We don’t call the shots anymore – they do.”

Remember when the Tea Party did this sort of thing?

Me, neither.

Hey, Obama, do you still support this movement? Hey, Democrats. Want to go into the election a year from now with these people at your side?

[Update a few minutes later]

Speaking of which, the president’s reelection odds are plunging.

[Update a while later]

From Iowahawk: “Good times for America’s beloved Nazi-endorsed bomb-chucking arsonist rape camp.”

A Few Words For #OWS

…from Bill Whittle.

[Update a few minutes later]

The Left’s war on self reliance (not a permalink).

[Update a couple minutes later]

They are the one percent:

Many “Occupy Wall Street” protesters arrested in New York City reside in more luxurious homes than some of their rhetoric might suggest, a Daily Caller investigation has found.

And what did the arrest records of all those Tea Party members reveal? Oh, wait! There aren’t any.

The Tea Party is a political movement. #OWS is a crime wave.

[Update late morning]

Lifestyles of the rich and arrested — a slideshow of homes of the “99%.”

[Bumped]

Hey, remember how Queen Nancy told us that the Tea Party was just astroturf, not a real grass-roots movement? Well, ACORN has been busted:

…an activist named Channing, who has been at the Occupy Wall Street protests from the beginning, volunteers the information that the former ACORN organization–through its new front group, New York Communities for Change–is paying $10 per hour and $100 per day to homeless people to attend the demonstrations.

It’s such a popular protest among the disaffected, they have to be paid to attend. And I wonder where ACORN is getting the money? From the 53%?

More Of That “Smart Diplomacy”

Thoughts on the UNESCO fiasco:

For the U.S., the UNESCO vote was a debacle, with the assembled states voting 107 to 14 in favor of admitting the Palestinians, and 52 states abstaining. That would have been the moment for the U.S. ambassador to read UNESCO’s assembly the riot act and announce that the U.S. was pulling out, as it did in 1984, under President Ronald Reagan; returning only in 2003, under President George W. Bush.

Instead, the U.S. diplomatic message to UNESCO has been one of apology, regrets and fawning statements of support for a U.N. body that has just slapped the U.S. in the chops. U.S officials have even been hinting that they are looking for some kind of workaround, to get the money flowing again.

Insanity.

The Latest Warm-Monger Scam

Some thoughts:

Here’s what interest me: why do the journalists and professors so fervently believe in things they cannot possibly verify on their own?

Well, they believe in the “scientists.” But why? Are all scientists always right? Of course not; the definition of science is that new information and ideas are constantly refining or overturning old verities. The definition of science is that scientists are sometimes wrong, or will be at some point.

What if it’s a class thing? Instapundit has a link to an essay class warfare within the New Class. “OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits — the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.”

This seems to me to be the same thing. Journalists who are not scientists, or professors who are not climate scientists, identify with the Knowledge Class: the technologists and researchers.

The phrase “the science is settled” is the very antithesis of science. But these people don’t really understand science.