Category Archives: History

The Red August

As tyranny seems to be descending on Hong Kong, remembering the bloody Cultural Revolution of 53 years ago.

And Bryan Preston has four questions.

[Update a while later]

The China challenge.

[Friday afternoon update]

“American flags in Hong Kong show that people still fight for our values. We should join them.”

I think he’s right, but there’s too much Trump bashing in here. Trump is not the problem.

[Bumped]

Trump And Gun Supporters

Is he following in the footsteps of George H. W. Bush?

This has always been the problem with Trump: He doesn’t have any firm ideological principles and is first and foremost a populist. This would be an opportunity for him to explain why these things won’t work, but it’s not clear that he even understands that, and instead he is going along with them.

Jeffrey Epstein

Gee, this isn’t suspicious at all.

[Update a few minutes later]

Sharyl Attkisson has some questions.

In retrospect, it’s surprising that he’s survived this long.

[Update early afternoon]

Here’s a more complete story. The biggest question right now: If he was taken off suicide watch, why?

[Update a few minutes later]

Ben Sasse has four questions for Bob Barr. I find the absence of any mention of Bill Clinton curious here.

[Monday-afternoon update]

Jeffrey Epstein gets Vince Fostered.

[Bumped]

Joe Scarborough

White supremacist?

[Late-morning update]

The strange case of white supremacy.

Yes, America is such a horrible racist place that millions of people of all races are clamoring and even risking their lives to get here.

And say, did you know that being pro-life is a white-supremacist position?

Yes, that’s right. Those evil white supremacists are trying to prevent the murder of millions of black babies in the womb.

Both Ohrs

…in troubled waters:

Mueller’s professed lack of knowledge during recent congressional testimony regarding Fusion GPS was inexplicable since, as former deputy assistant attorney general Bruce Ohr’s closed-door testimony before Congress shows, Weissmann had full knowledge of the fake nature of the Steele dossier that was a major predicate of the Russian witch-hunt that became the Mueller probe. Weissmann knew there was collusion with the Russians, and that it was between the DNC, the Clinton campaign, British agent Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS, the DoJ, the FBI and, yes, Russian sources interested in upending the Trump presidency.

Bruce Ohr, the number four official at the Justice Department as U.S. Deputy Associate Attorney General and the highest-ranking nonappointee, with an office a couple of doors down from Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, kept Weissmann “in the loop” about the fake dossier and its journeys through the deep-state swamp, along with a myriad of other co-conspirators in a web of conspiracy and deceit so vast that Watergate trivia question Carl Bernstein may be right in a way he did not intend when he suggested this whole matter may be bigger than Watergate. It seems only the DoJ janitor was not involved.

If Horowitz finally releases his report next month, it may be a very interesting month.

Lies, Damned Lies…

…and gun-shooting statistics:

For a variety of reasons having to do with social and economic factors the firearms murder rate went down. What the current debate really seems to be about is whether rapid-fire guns increase the frequency of a special kind of crime called mass shootings. However, this is a somewhat artificial category. Mass shootings are a subset of the larger phenomenon of mass killings, sometimes referred to as rampage killings. “A rampage involves the (attempted) killing of multiple persons at least partly in public space by a single physically present perpetrator using (potentially) deadly weapons in a single event without any cooling-off period.”

It is one killer, one place, one time, many victims in a setting outside of war. The data collected on this type of even notes the type of weapon used, which is not always a firearm. It is mass killings that one would want to reduce, not just mass shootings.

The brothers in the Boston Marathon bombing didn’t use guns. As with the “War on Terror,” this is the insanity of going after inanimate objects, instead of the would-be murderers.

[Monday-morning update]

Six ways Bill Clinton lies about the “assault weapons” ban.

To be fair, though, Bill Clinton lies about a lot of things.

Democrat Defamation

First Juaquin Castro outs one of his own supporters as a Trump supporter, forcing him to take protective action for his family, then Liz Warren defames Darren Wilson about what happened in Ferguson.

Neither is a public figure, and in the case of Wilson, even if he is, this was provably reckless disregard for the truth, which makes it actionable. Both of them should sue, to get the attention of the other vicious liars. I’d think they’d get plenty of donations for the legal funds.