90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, February 21, 2023

The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #2000

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

Visage à trois #1307

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #964

British Taxpayer-Funded Anti-Extremist Study Finds Shakespeare, Orwell, Tolkien "Key Texts" For "White Supremacists"

Several of the UK’s most respected TV shows, movies, and works of literature have been included in a list of works that could potentially encourage far-right sympathies, compiled by the taxpayer-funded and government-led ‘Prevent’ counter-terrorism program.

As The Daily Mail reports, works by some of the world’s greatest writers were included as examples of warning signs of potential extremism, including Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Tennyson, Orwell, Huxley, Kipling and Edmund Burke.

The flagship Prevent scheme, recently the subject of a scathing audit, singled out comedies Yes Minister and The Thick Of It, the 1955 epic war film The Dam Busters, and even The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare as possible red flags of extremism.

Prevent is a key part of the UK's counter-terrorism strategy as a means to safeguard against "vulnerable people being drawn into criminal behavior".

In practical terms, it places public bodies, including schools and the police, under a legal duty to identify people who may turn to extremism, and intervene in their lives before it is too late.

If the local panels find someone who is at risk of becoming a terrorist, the Prevent teams use specialist mentors or other support programs to turn around their lives.

It said the works of fiction were "key texts" for "white nationalists/supremacists".

Right-leaning writer Douglas Murray obtained the full list and discovered that one of his books had been given a red flag by Prevent.

He wrote in The Spectator:
"A number of books are singled out, the possession or reading of which could point to severe wrongthink and therefore potential radicalisation.

It seems that RICU [Prevent’s Research Information and Communications Unit ] is so far off-track that it believes that books identifying the problem that it was itself set up to tackle are in fact a part of the problem."
House of Cards screenwriter Andrew Davies said:
"It almost seems like a joke. House Of Cards was actually a satirical view of Right-wing politics. This list includes more or less the entire classical canon of literature and some of the very best British television programs ever made."
The list has emerged following a major review criticized the Prevent scheme by William Shawcross.

His report, published earlier this month, criticised the £49million-a-year scheme Prevent scheme, saying it applied a ‘double standard’ to Islamist and far-Right threats, prioritizing the latter.

The BBC reports, Mr Shawcross said he had been consistently unable to determine how many community organisations receiving a slice of...

Somehow Biden has transferred his own checkered history of racial disparagement onto the white working class.

Joe Biden ran on “unity,” which is critical in a multiracial America. He vowed to heal the divisions supposedly sown by Donald Trump. Instead, he is proving to be the most polarizing president in modern memory. Often his racialist rhetoric and condescension have proven demeaning to both blacks and whites. In a volatile multiracial democracy that demands tolerance and restraint, a highly unpopular Biden, for cheap political advantage, continually proves incendiary and reckless.

Last week Joe Biden snarked after watching a White House screening of Till:

Lynched for simply being black, nothing more. With white crowds, white families gathered to celebrate the spectacle, taking pictures of the bodies and mailing them as postcards. Hard to believe, but that’s what was done. And some people still want to do that.

Exactly who are these “some people”? Who fits Biden’s innuendos of contemporary “some people” who, he alleges in 2023, still wish, as “white crowds, white families” of the past, to mail celebratory postcards after they lynch black people? The Ultra-MAGA villains of his recent Phantom of the Opera speech? Have his current targets ever echoed anything like Biden’s own racist past warning that busing would force people to “grow up in a racial jungle”?

What current data might support Biden’s absurd charges? Is Biden referring to federal interracial crime and hate crime statistics charting violent white propensities against blacks? None exist. In fact, they continually reveal that so-called whites are underrepresented as perpetrators in both categories, while overrepresented as victims in interracial crimes—dramatically so in the case of black-on-white violent crime.

In our sensationalist YouTube world, are we suffering an epidemic of Internet-fed, white-on-black incendiary crimes that might have prompted the president’s demagogic accusations? Not at all. Most of the most recent publicized interracial violence—a woman in a gym fighting off a would-be rapist, a bicyclist doctor stabbed to death in an intersection as his attacker spewed racial hatred, a 26-year-old mother lethally shot in the back in front of her children in a parking lot over a minor argument, a young boy violently choked on a bus, a small girl on a bus beaten repeatedly by two teenage boys—have involved black perpetrators and apparent white victims. So, what contemporary evidence or widely publicized anecdotes prompt Biden’s recent charges of “white rage”-fueled violence?

Yet simultaneously with Biden’s blanket and unsupported charges of racism, no president since Woodrow Wilson has offloaded more racialist verbiage than Joe Biden himself. In an eerie example of psychological projection, never has a president accused others of racism more, while freely revealing himself either to be a racist or non compos mentis, or both.

Stranger still, Biden’s latest accusation comes from a president who once eulogized the former racist, Exalted Cyclops, and segregationist Senator. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) as “one of my mentors” and lamented that “the Senate is a lesser place for his going.” That was no isolated fluke.

During his campaign for the presidency, Biden in 2019 praised segregationist Senator James O. Eastland for not labeling a younger Biden with the derogatory term “boy”: “I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland. He never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son.’”

How odd, then, that Biden, as president no less, has used just that derogatory insult “boy” for distinguished blacks. Indeed, the very day before Biden leveled his “some people” slur, he was back at it with his racist “boy” reference to the black governor of Maryland: “You got a hell of a new governor in Wes Moore, I tell ya,” Biden told an audience of union workers on Wednesday. “He’s the real deal, and the boy looked like he could still play. He got some guns on him.”

Such condescension was consistent with Biden’s past usage of “Negro” and his earlier August 2021 similar “boy” trope of referring to one of own top aides: “I’m here with my senior adviser and boy who knows Louisiana very, very well and New Orleans, Cedric Richmond.”

In Biden world, blacks seem to be a collective to whom he can pander in stereotypical terms, as opposed to Latinos, whom Biden feels can think for themselves. Or so he said on the campaign trail in 2020, “Unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things.”

These were “gaffes” only if one believes Biden’s frequent racialist smears and slurs are more the symptoms of senility than bias. Again, as a 2020 candidate, Biden gave us his absurd racist “Corn Pop” fables. In these concocted, He-Man sagas, Biden stood down purported ghetto gangster with his own custom-cut chain, while often showing his tanned legs’ golden hairs to curious inner-city black youth.

Biden also smeared two black journalists who had the temerity to ask him a few tough questions, one with the now infamous slang ad hominem, “You ain’t black” and the other with the personal dismissal “junkie.”

A consistent trope in these insults is his lifelong condescension of accomplished black Americans, such as his long-ago infamous talk-down to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas during Biden’s travesty of conducting his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings. In that context we also remember Biden’s idiotic warning, replete with his accustomed affected black patois, to black professionals in 2012 that Mitt Romney would “put y’all back in chains.”

Like Bill Clinton, who reportedly uttered of supposed 2008 upstart Barack Obama, “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee,” Biden was especially bewildered by Barack Obama. He apparently seemed, in Biden’s racialist view, an aberration from Biden’s own usual stereotyped views of blacks of limited ability: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.” That assessment came from a candidate, who, even predementia, could never string together more than a few coherent sentences.

Biden, remember, explained top-performing states in education as attributable to fewer minorities: “There’s less than 1 percent of the population in Iowa that is African American. There is probably less than 4 or 5 percent that are minorities. What is in Washington? So, look, it goes back to what you start off with, what you’re dealing with.”

In a world of law schools turning out record numbers of black lawyers, and billionaire entrepreneurs like Bob Johnson, Jay-Z, Kanye West, Oprah Winfrey, or Michael Jordan, Biden opines, “The data shows young black entrepreneurs are just as capable of succeeding given the chance as white entrepreneurs are. But they don’t have lawyers. They don’t have, they don’t have accountants, but they have great ideas.”

The reason we do not associate Biden with characteristic racist stereotyping and tropes, other than with raw political demagoguery, is the same reason we give passes to liberals who say overtly racist things, which might otherwise suggest that their loud progressive rhetoric serves as some sort of psychological mechanism to square the circle of their own discomfort with...

Visage à trois #1306

Three Videos For Your Viewing Pleasure:

Three Additional Bonus Videos:

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #963

CBO Report Exposes How Democrats Made A Bad Budget Situation Worse

The Congressional Budget Office demolished lies about the nation’s fiscal health that Biden tried to peddle in his State of the Union address.

n Wednesday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its annual analysis of the budget and economic outlook over the coming decade. For anyone with a realistic sense of budgets and fiscal responsibility (i.e., not most Democrats), the lengthy document made for bracing reading.

As bad as you think the budget situation is, CBO noted that in the past year, it has gotten much worse. And if Democrats have their way when it comes to fiscal policy, things will still somehow worsen.

Spending Blowouts Increase the Deficit

CBO demolished two fictions that President Biden tried to peddle in his State of the Union address regarding the nation’s fiscal standing. In his speech, Biden claimed that deficits have gone down under his watch — a claim based largely on the fact that members of his own party rejected the full $5 trillion Build Back Bankrupt spending blowout he proposed.

Nevertheless, CBO estimated that the federal deficit would increase by $34 billion this year compared to last year. The budget office also noted that the deficit increase this year “would be larger if not for a shift in the timing of certain payments,” as some payments will get shifted because this fiscal year ends on a Saturday.

Over the longer term, Appendix A at the end of the report demonstrated how badly the nation’s financial standing has deteriorated under this president. Specifically, the estimated 10-year deficit has increased by $3.1 trillion, or nearly 20 percent, just since last May. Most of the increase stems from two sources.

Legislative changes accounted for a net increase in the deficit of nearly $1.5 trillion. The “burn pit bill” providing new benefits to veterans — which was not paid for — plus Democrats’ partisan reconciliation bill and last December’s omnibus spending bill blowout collectively account for the vast share of this deficit increase.

Economic changes account for another nearly $1.2 trillion of the deficit increase. Higher inflation will generate more than $900 billion in new revenue as individuals and corporations get pushed into higher tax brackets — but inflation will also cause $2.1 trillion in additional spending on higher Social Security benefits, Medicare and Medicaid benefits, federal pensions, and other similar programs, more than wiping out any budgetary savings from the increase in tax revenue. In other words, thanks to spending by congressional Democrats and loose monetary policies by the Federal Reserve over the last several years, the American people will suffer both higher taxes and higher deficits.

Biden claimed in his speech to Congress that his budget, due for public release on March 9, “is going to cut the deficit by … $2 trillion.” The CBO report demonstrated how such an amount of deficit reduction wouldn’t even undo the deterioration of the country’s fiscal position over the past nine months, let alone the...