RICHARD FERNANDEZ:

“…But the men of D-Day closed off these alternative futures; they won and by winning shut out an infinity of possibilities and set us on the path we are on today. And what a long way it has been. Three generations ago the French and British empires still existed. The USSR was an ally. Churchill had not yet coined the term “Iron Curtain.” On the Los Alamos plateau, physicists still wondered whether an atom bomb would work. The only electronic computer in the world was at Bletchley Park, a guarded secret. Space travel was as yet a fantastic dream.

Seventy-five years later, most universities teach those empires were things of horror. The USSR is no more. “A fifth of British teenagers believe Sir Winston Churchill was a fictional character, while many think Sherlock Holmes, King Arthur and Eleanor Rigby were real.” The atom bomb waxed, waned and waxed again. Nearly everyone carries a computer in his pocket orders of magnitude more powerful than Bletchley’s Colossus. Man landed on the moon 50 years ago.

And what of D-Day? Like the fading black and white chemical film on which its images were captured, modern culture has lost the detail, emotional tone and context once provided by living memory. What still remains is posterized, compressed and pixellated to the point where, to paraphrase Tennyson, “they are become a name.” The Longest Day grows less distinct with each passing year…”

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That first headline, you can’t make that up!

The next one is for Sis Law

 

 

An F-22 Raptor assigned to the 525th Fighter Squadron from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, flies away after refueling from a KC-135 Stratotanker assigned to the 909th Air Refueling Squadron from Kadena Air Base, Japan, during exercise Northern Edge, May 16, 2019, over Alaska.

Austin Bay:

“…On June 4, 1989, the PLA slaughtered over 2,000 peaceful protestors. Now Beijing forbids discussing the massacre and seeks to erase it from history.

The government has tried to erase photo evidence of the massacre, or at least prevent mainland China’s people from seeing images on the internet. Arguably the most iconic photo was snapped June 5, the day after the slaughter: In Tiananmen Square, a lone Chinese man stands before a PLA main battle tank. The man carries two shopping bags. There is video of the incident. After the tank stopped, the courageous fellow climbed aboard and spoke with the soldiers. He was eventually dragged into the crowd, and … then he disappeared. The government still claims it has never found the man and doesn’t know his name. Realists believe he is in a secret jail or an unmarked grave…”

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Satire, but is it really?

New trend of progressive protest against racial injustice is taking the internet by storm.

“…If there’s one thing that liberals and progressives know best, it’s how to protest effectively and efficiently. Whether it be marching in the street, marching on the freeway, drinking soy milk or pouring water on themselves, discrimination and oppression is often fought in ways that would make our forefathers proud.

Trump’s racist immigration policies have had so many negative effects ranging from the separation of families to locking children in cages to the suppression of voting from undocumented migrants. That’s why liberals across the nation are taking it upon themselves to protest Trump’s immigration policies by putting their heads in freezers…”

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Even if the quest to destroy Trump eclipses all else, it seems not to matter to these modern Ahabs.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:

“…One way of envisioning the Democratic obsessions with Donald Trump is as an addiction. We have seen the initial impeachment efforts; the attempt to get him under the emoluments clause, the Logan Act, and the 25th Amendment; the Russian collusion hoax; the Mueller investigation; the demand for his tax returns; and the psychodramas involving Michael Avenatti, Michael Cohen, and Stormy Daniels. Relentless progressives have needed a new Get Trump fix about every two months.

More practically, their fixation also substitutes for a collective poverty of ideas. The Democratic party has no plan to secure the borders other than to be against whatever Trump is for. They would not build a wall, deport illegal entrants, end sanctuary cities, fine employers, or do much of anything but allow almost anyone to enter the U.S…”

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Left-wing activists aren’t going to stop with social-media networks, or with nibbling at the soft right-wing fringe of discourse.

Michael Brendan Dougherty:

“…Silicon Valley’s behemoth companies are incapable of steering through the cross-pressures pushing them to censor more. These pressures come from social activists working on them through threatened boycotts, it comes from activists among their own employees and on their boards. These pressures come from centrist and liberal-leaning governments, which increasingly blame social media companies for their electoral failures. And surely these pressures also come from corporations who want to buy advertising on these massive platforms.

Several stories from the last week highlight the sheer variety of these pressures. The health-and-exercise movement Crossfit has recently seen one of its diet-discussion groups suppressed on Facebook. And the group subsequently urged the withdrawal of its members from the platform in stark terms, effectively alleging that Facebook is part of a larger corruptive force in social life:

Facebook is acting in the service of food and beverage industry interests by deleting the accounts of communities that have identified the corrupted nutritional science responsible for unchecked global chronic disease. In this, it follows the practices of Wikipedia and other private platforms that host public content but retain the ability to remove or silence — without the opportunity for real debate or appeal — information and perspectives outside a narrow scope of belief or thought.

Last week YouTube also took down a new documentary, Borderless, produced by right-wing activist Lauren Southern. The documentary features interviews with human traffickers, and undercover recordings of workers for non-governmental organizations who are assisting migrants. Southern is one of the many “alt-light”-style YouTube stars who have emerged there. YouTube’s decision to take down her video is renewing an argument on the right that access to digital platforms should be a right. This argument is being made vociferously in the renewed Human Events, by Will Chamberlain:

Southern has over 700,000 subscribers on YouTube. Those subscribers belong to her, not the company. She should be able to count on those subscribers seeing a film that violated none of the YouTube terms of service. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that Southern would have embarked on this project had she not assumed she could show the end product to her audience.

Southern didn’t simply rely on her platform to justify all the time and energy spent making Borderless; she relied on YouTube’s previous commitments to content neutrality to justify building up her platform in the first place. And yet YouTube is utterly flippant about deleting her content.

It’s not just a matter of being careless over its own commitments, of course. YouTubers could make an argument that not only the near-monopoly position of YouTube in social video but the fact that digital platforms like it were, because of their viewpoint neutrality, privileged over traditional media companies in the law, has allowed it to capture and profit so much of the public square, and so government has a compelling democratic interest in guaranteeing greater freedom of expression on these platforms.

Finally, Canada seems to be giving Silicon Valley a warning ahead of its upcoming elections. The current government, under Justin Trudeau, announced that it had come to “an agreement” with Microsoft and Facebook to “boost security.” It also happens to be the case that the government is currently underwater in the polls.

Canada’s government claims that bad actors, including Russia, could try to interfere with their election. Though this is something that is rumored or feared in all big elections. You may recall that ahead of the last presidential election in France, there were wild reports of Russian interference on behalf of populist nationalists; Russia had hacked Emmanuel Macron’s email. News reports flew out with the heavy implication that one would be carrying out the Russian interest to vote for the nationalist Marine Le Pen’s National Front. Oddly, the defense against election hacking took on an international character. America’s National Security Agency announced that indeed it had evidencethat the Russians had hacked France’s democracy. Months later it was admitted that there was no evidence to suggest that Russia had hacked Emmanuel Macron’s email. In other words, by suggesting falsely, that foreign actors were interfering in French elections, security agencies had in reality tarred domestic political enemies as dupes and patsies…”

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 NCAA: The Best Woman Athlete is a Man.

The biased, corrupt press fail to notice.

“…The actual measured temperature record shows something different: There have been hot years and hot decades since the turn of the last century, and colder years and colder decades. But the overall measured temperature shows no clear trend over the last century, at least not one that suggests runaway warming.

That is, until the NOAA’s statisticians “adjust” the data. Using complex statistical models, they change the data to reflect not reality, but their underlying theories of global warming. That’s clear from a simple fact of statistics: Data generate random errors, which cancel out over time. So by averaging data, the errors mostly disappear.

That’s not what NOAA does.

According to the NOAA, the errors aren’t random. They’re systematic. As we noted, all of their temperature adjustments lean cooler in the distant past, and warmer in the more recent past. But they’re very fuzzy about why this should be.

Far from legitimately “adjusting” anything, it appears they are cooking the data to show a politically correct trend toward global warming. Not by coincidence, that has been part and parcel of the government’s underlying policies for the better part of two decades.

What NOAA does aren’t niggling little changes, either…”

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