Telling The 'Guardian' Some Unwelcome Truths...

On to Mamet’s much-documented swing to conservatism, from his stand against the NFL’s kneeling-during-the-anthem protests to his support for Donald Trump. It seems so far away from the leftist leanings of his youth, the critiques of capitalism clearly visible in American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross.

“I was never, ever a communist,” he says. “All you need to know about communism is that Marx was a sponger. He lived off Engels’ family who had a furniture factory.”

He was raised as a “red diaper baby”, he adds – meaning his parents were communists – so even to say he is a Republican “sticks in my throat”. But he is a conservative because “I would like to conserve those things I grew up with: the love of family, the love of the country, love of service, love of God, love of community.”

You can just imagine the look on the interviewer's face at this point, can't you? And there's more:

And love of the American constitution too. “For those who say the constitution is over 200 years old and can’t still be relevant, I say, ‘Well, what about the Ten Commandments?’ What’s going to rule in its place? Savagery.”

And there's still no escape for our hapless interlocutor: 

Mamet became a vocal Trump supporter during his presidency, which can’t have been easy in the Democratic stronghold of California. “Well, he did a great job as a president.” Really? “Well, if you put everything you see on these little screens aside and look at what happened during the Trump presidency. We told China to knock it off. We told Nato to start paying their fair share. We moved the Embassy of the United States to Jerusalem in Israel, fixing the only instance in history of a country that didn’t have an embassy in its capital city. Gas prices were down. There was the lowest black unemployment in history …”

The sweat must by now be rolling down his back.  

There was also Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was rigged. Does Mamet believe America’s democratic process to be flawed too? “It’s an interesting question. I grew up in Chicago, which was run as a mob’s fiefdom by Mayor Richard J Daley. So all elections were rigged. The idea that people are not going to steal elections is ignorance because people steal elections all the time. The question is: ‘What was the extent of the election rigging?’ I don’t know. But was it questionable? Yes.”

Poor guy will need therapy after that interview! 

She's Clearly Not Chosen Honesty Though...

A Rhodes Scholar who won a coveted scholarship at Oxford after claiming she overcame childhood abuse and grew up in foster care has been accused of lying to officials and is in fact the daughter of a radiologist who went to private school.

Mackenzie Fierceton, 24, describes herself as a 'queer, first generation, low income' student at The University of Pennsylvania. In 2020, she was given a scholarship to go to Oxford after dazzling the Rhodes Trust with her story of how she overcame welfare, an abusive mother and the foster care system.

In other words, she saw the boxes and decided to tick them all. After all, why not? It's not like anyone ever checks, clearly: 

But after a November 2020 Philadelphia Inquirer news article about the scholarship, lauded her as a 'first-generation student' who 'has been low-income throughout her life, and grew up in foster care,' an anonymous tipster contacted the Rhodes Trust and UPenn to report her for being 'blatantly dishonest'.

Ooops! 

Now, she has withdrawn from the Rhodes program and UPenn is withholding her masters degree pending further investigation.

Be sure your sins will find you out...but what does mum - sorry, mom - have to say about this? 

In a statement to The Chronicle in light of the scholarship being revoked, Dr. Morrison said of her daughter: 'Mackenzie is deeply loved by her mom and family.

'Our greatest desire is that Mackenzie chooses to live a happy, healthy, honest, and productive life, using her extraordinary gifts for the highest good.'

She could go into politics or journalism, I guess. She seems eminently qualified.  

I Think You Have A Different Idea Of What 'Botched' Means, 'Guardian'...

'Worse'..? They are executing people twice, then?

More than half of the states in the US have either abolished the death penalty or have formal suspensions in place, as the country’s use of the brutal punishment continues to wither on the vine.

For the 'Guardian', it's the judicially applied sentence that is 'brutal', ignoring the crimes that got them that sentence... 

Oklahoma botched its first execution in six years, that of John Grant who was observed convulsing and vomiting on the gurney.

Didn't 'botch it' at all. He's dead, isn't he? I don't suppose the cafeteria worker he stabbed to death while in prison went quietly and peacefully...

Reflecting a centuries-old distortion, more than three out of every four of the victims of this year’s murders ending in new death sentences were white. No non-white victim was involved in any case leading to a white person being condemned to death.

*shrugs* So? Maybe that tells you more about the nature of black on white murder than it does about 'racism'.. 

Those who died in 2021 at the hands of the Trump administration were Lisa Montgomery, a profoundly mentally-ill woman who had suffered a lifetime of abuse tantamount to torture; Corey Johnson who was severely intellectually disabled; and Dustin Higgs who indisputably did not kill anybody.

Interesting that the 'Guardian chooses to take out an onion for a woman who strangled a 23 year old pregnant mother-to-be before cutting the baby out of her womb and kidnapping it, a drug dealer whose 'intellectual shortcomings' didn't prevent him being responsible for killing seven people and the getaway driver for a serial killer who murdered three women while he waited in the car... 

I mean, there must be some people whose execution seems like it was wrong or unjust to normal-thinking people. But the left-wing media never seems to be able to find any.

If You Take Your Foot Out Of Your Mouth...

Brook Love, a 63-year-old from Milwaukee, said the outcome was typical of the racial injustice she’s seen throughout her life as a Black woman.

“What happened today is not right,” she said. “Any reasonable person can see that. People call this a judicial system. I call it a non-system, because most systems work. This non-system is not working. It’s a miscarriage of justice.

“If a person of colour would have shot those people, they’d be under the jail. There’s a double standard. How dare anyone call this a judicial system?”

...I'll treat you to a nice cup of Coffee, Brook: 

Case closed.

 

This Isn't The Cause Célèbre You Think It Is...

Cell phone video captured the harrowing moment a teenage mother from California was shot in the back of the head by a school safety officer, leaving her brain dead.

And the non-left on Twitter are making much of the fact that she's not receiving the Saint George Floyd treatment from activists and the press, because the official who fired the shots is black, and she's Hispanic. 

But let's look more closely at the actual details, shall we?  

Rodriguez, who has a five-month-old son, was shot as she drove away from the scene near Millikan High School in Long Beach on Monday.

The scene of what? Well, not just the shooting: 

That afternoon, Rodriguez had gotten into a fight with a 15-year-old girl. She was struck by a bullet while leaving the school in a car with the father of her child, Rafeul Chowdhury, 20, and his 16-year-old brother. None of the people in the car were students at the school.

Translation: She went to finish her beef with the girl, aided by her baby-daddy. But surely, you cry, that shouldn't warrant shooting her?  

Video shows the officer fire two shots at the car, which nearly hits him as it speeds out of the parking lot. Chowdhury was driving the vehicle.

Gosh, that puts a different complexion on it, doesn't it? 

Alex Cervantes, Mona's cousin, told reported she did not deserve to get shot. 'She might have been doing something she wasn't supposed to, but she was unarmed,' he said.

She was in a deadly weapon being aimed at an official trying to stop her fleeing the scene of a crime, though...  

The family have launched up a GoFundMe page to help cover funeral and legal expenses, and to help support Rodriguez's son.

I hope she gets what she's worth. 

"They livin' it up at the Hotel California..."

And the residents are fleeing in their droves as a result:

Scott Thatcher and his wife Angela were born in California and love the sun-kissed Golden State. But two months ago they sold their home, packed up their belongings and travelled 1,700 miles with their three sons to start a new life in Texas.

Now the couple have a far bigger home in Fort Worth – and although they earn slightly less, they take home more money thanks to lower taxes in Texas.

As Scott says: ‘You pay a high premium for the Californian lifestyle.’

It seems to be a lifestyle that people feel is no longer worth that price. Lots of people... 

For the first time in a glorious 171-year history that attracted thousands seeking fortunes during the 19th Century Gold Rush, gave birth to the global movie industry and unleashed the digital revolution, California has seen its population – currently just under 40 million – decline.

It shrank by 182,083 last year – equivalent to all the citizens living in the coastal idylls of Santa Monica and Santa Barbara combined.

And it's not just taxes. Far from it. 

Families and firms are being driven away by the high cost of living, crime fears, hefty taxes, inadequate housing, interfering officials, persistent political failures, red tape, raging wildfires and the squalor of streets littered with homeless drug addicts.

‘It is very sad,’ said Scott. ‘I will always love California but it has changed. It is not what it was when I was a kid, or even five years ago. I could never go back.’

It's very sad - I loved San Francisco when I visited 20 years ago, but even then, the rot was beginning to set in.  

Delian Asparouhov is typical of those who turned California into such a powerhouse: a computer geek who attended the top-ranking Massachusetts Institute of Technology, launched a space start-up, was backed by a billionaire and became a venture capitalist in the state.

Yet this month the Bulgarian-born entrepreneur, still ony 27, bought a house in Miami, Florida.

He said: ‘Silicon Valley has a stifling intellectual climate with its mono-culture that only allows one viewpoint to be expressed. It seems to espouse the same socialist values as the Soviet Union.

‘So I am fleeing just like my parents fled a similar system for America when I was a kid.’

Ouch! What do the politicians think about this? Well, you guessed it...

Little wonder senior Democratic figures are on the defensive.

And how!

A senior Democrat faces the media... 

One insisted to me that the population exodus was ‘largely a myth’ spread by political enemies.

‘The whole notion that people are fleeing California in droves is false,’ he said.

Numbers don't lie.  

Heading Off Trouble At The Pass...

Montana’s governor has signed a bill that bans transgender athletes from competing on school and university sports teams that correspond with their gender.

Predictably, the usual suspects got up on their hind legs and barked like trained seals:

“If you look at the legislature’s justification for advancing the transgender sports ban, they could cite not one instance where transgender participation in athletics has been a problem or caused conflict,” said Alex Rate, legal director of ACLU of Montana.

Not in Montana, yet? Well, it won't be long... 

A female New Zealand Olympic weightlifter says women complaining about transgender athlete Laurel Hubbard competing in the Tokyo Games are being told to 'be quiet'.

 Yeah, you aren't reading it wrong - it says 'post' not 'pre'!

So the governor is being forward-looking. What's wrong with that?

"We Stopped Counting It, So It's Gone Down..."

A year ago, as the coronavirus began to spread across Maryland, Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby stopped prosecuting drug possession, prostitution, minor traffic violations and other low-level offenses, a move aimed at curbing Covid-19's spread behind bars.

That shift — repeated by prosecutors in many other cities — didn’t just reduce jail populations. In Baltimore, nearly all categories of crime have since declined...

Umm... 

...confirming to Mosby what she and criminal justice experts have argued for years: Crackdowns on quality-of-life crimes are not necessary for stopping more serious crime.

Wait, what? 

On Friday, Mosby announced that she was making her pandemic experiment permanent, saying Baltimore — for decades notorious for runaway violence and rough policing — had become a case study in criminal justice reform.

It's a case study in something, all right! 

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University found sharp reductions in calls to police complaining about drugs and prostitution, she said.

Because if they aren't going to do anything about it, what's the point..? 

Well, You've Convinced Me...

Yaa Gyasi, a novelist apparently, and one can only hope she writes more coherently than in this whine for the 'Guardian':

I was thinking about that driver’s words again last summer as news poured in about the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. I was thinking about the way in which white people, in order to justify their own grotesque violence, so often engage in a kind of fiction, an utterly insidious denialism that creates the reality it claims to protest. By which I mean an unwillingness to see the violence that is actually happening before you because of a presumption of violence that might happen, is itself a kind of violence. What exactly can a man with a knee on his neck do, what can a sleeping woman do to deserve their own murder?

Well, on the one hand, be a convicted career criminal who held a gun to a pregnant woman's belly, and on the other, be the ex-girlfriend of a drug dealer and sleeping with a man who shoots at the police when they enter with a warrant.  

You've never heard that expression 'Lie down with dogs, wake up with 9mm bullet holes', Yaa?

So many of the writers of colour that I know have had white people treat their work as though it were a kind of medicine. Something they have to swallow in order to improve their condition, but they don’t really want it, they don’t really enjoy it, and if they’re being totally honest, they don’t actually even take the medicine half the time.

You've convinced me your brand of snake oil isn't worth taking, that's for sure. I won't be buying your opus. Or reading it for free, either.

Newsflash: You Just Did...

“I know one thing that we found in our analysis is that 60% of our emissions come from … residential heating and passenger vehicles,” said David Ismay, Massachusetts, undersecretary for climate change, during a virtual meeting with the Vermont Climate Council.

“Let me say that again: 60% of our emissions that need to be reduced come from you, the person on your street, the senior on fixed-income. Right now, there is no bad guy left, at least in Massachusetts, to point the finger at and turn the screws on and now break their will, so they stop emitting. That’s you. We have to break your will.”

A rare flash of the real iron fist in the velvet glove there.  

But Ismay also admitted his remarks would not be popular. “I can’t even say that publicly,” Ismay said.

Unfortunately, as you know by now, you just did. Very publicly. 

That prediction seemingly came to fruition when the state’s Republican Gov. Charlie Baker got wind of the statements, which he insisted “no one who works in our administration should ever say or think.”

You can certainly stop them from saying it - or at least, make sure there are consequences when caught - but I don't think you're going to get very far trying to stop them thinking it...