Quick Jots: November Review
Joe Biden Declared Winner, People Lose Their Shit
The day several outlets declared Joe Biden the winner, numerous people took to the streets to celebrate. Hooray! The author of the 1994 crime bill that very well may have contributed to the death of Breonna Taylor won! The Veep that presided over an administration responsible for starting the catastrophic wars in Libya, Syria and Yemen won! The same administration that deported more immigrants than any other president, and built all these inhumane detention centers won! Win? People were rioting for months now because of police violence and now that one of the key players that contributed to legislation that enabled this has been elected, those same people are elated. The same people that protested wars before Obama are elated. The same people that excoriated Trump for his deportation of immigrants are elated. People are weird. Or dumb. Maybe both. He has distanced himself from his crime bill without admitting fault. Maybe he won't make things worse on that front. I'm not going to hold my breath on that one. No violence was reported (aside from a skirmish at a Trump parade in DC, but violence only broke out when Antifa showed up), as some people bizarrely were predicting if Trump lost. I've never seen people so happy about such a dismal result compared to prognostications.
Nanny Newsom sets rules for Thanksgiving
Newsom decides unilaterally to impose Thanksgiving restrictions, limiting the number of households to three. He also decrees that gatherings should be outdoors, but it's okay to use bathrooms indoors as long as it's well sanitized. Gee, thanks for letting grandma occasionally use the bathroom as she freezes her ass off outside. How magnanimous of you.
The Guessing Begins for Harris's Vacated Senate Seat
As Kamala Harris, Top Cop, slides into the Vice President position, the guessing begins for who will replace her. Unsurprisingly, the talk revolves entirely around race. The AP article does not highlight a single policy position, vote record, or accomplishment of any candidate. The only discussion is the color of the skin of the candidate and what race the new senator should be. There's no way to put this lightly. This state is run by a bunch of racist, prepubescent children.
I am No Longer a Minority, I Guess
Hot shit! A Washington school district lumped Asians in with whites as far as minority status goes. I guess I'm white now. I can't wait to get some of that white privilege I keep hearing about! The woke left sure hates Asians, with how we all seem to ruin their narrative of white nationalism keeping minorities down. It seems like backlash caused the school to take down its previous racial regrouping. Well, darn. I was all ready to oppress some people, too. I guess I'll have to wait now until we get reclassified again by a different all-white school board.
Newsom Attends Birthday Party at French Laundry
Talk about the bad optics of bad optics. Newsom imposed rules against gatherings of over three families and imposed rules that devastated families financially. So of course, he goes and celebrates a friend's birthday party with well over three families, at French Laundry, the top restaurant in the state, whose guest of honor is a major lobbyist, no less. Other attendees include health lobbyists, influential in lockdown orders. This is who you elected, California. You get what you vote for. Newsom has since apologized, saying he should have driven home when he saw the number of people there. No, not good enough. You should have apologized for being a despot and imposing these lockdowns in the first place. Rules for thee but not for me, unless I get caught.
Keith Rabois Latest Tech VC to Flee San Francisco
Rabois, a cofounder of Paypal with libertarianish Peter Thiel, is the latest VC to flee San Francisco, saying, "I think San Francisco is just so massively improperly run and managed that it's impossible to stay here." Rabois joins a host of other movers and shakers in tech like Thiel, Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, Tim Ferriss, Joe Lonsdale, among others, who site the lack of ideological diversity and a mismanaged government as primary reasons for leaving the region. Although I've more or less known this would happen for some time, I wonder if this is leading to a great downfall of the Bay Area in general, or more similar to Detroit, where the mismanagement is centrally located in several select regions while its outskirts survive. Or perhaps the culture, geography and climate are such that it's impossible for even these idiots that run the state to screw up to those proportions. My money is not on the latter.
Glenn Greenwald on The Fifth Column and Reason Interview
Glenn Greenwald has been making the rounds, appearing on Joe Rogan, the Reason Interview, and the Fifth Column. He shocked the world by departing from his newspaper outlet, The Intercept. On the Fifth Column, he talked about a few things I didn't know of, previously. He mentioned that following the election of Donald Trump, newspapers' internal Slack channels were flooded with "journalists" talking about how they need to apologize for running the Clinton email scandal stories since it got Trump elected, in a blatant admission that so-called journalists regretted doing their jobs and a clear goal of no longer being journalists to instead be activists. It's no wonder the Hunder Biden laptop story got buried.
Specifically about his resignation, he stated that his contract at The Intercept explicitly allowed him to publish any article on a different platform should the editors there refuse to publish any piece of his. He alleges that in his Hunter Biden email story, The Intercept editors forbade him from publishing on any other medium as well, in clear violation of his contract, clearly crossing the line from declining to print into blatant censorship territory.
In his interview with Nick Gillespie, he stated that he didn't think the editors thought his article would sway the election at all, but were more afraid of what their friends would say about them at swanky cosmopolitan parties, at which Greenwald remarked made it "even more repellent to me." He continued to talk about how traditional media was circling the drain before Trump and ironically, it was Trump that saved their jobs, with a clear boogeyman to spice up their stories. He thinks that with media jobs drying up during the Obama years, it made journalists warier of saying something that challenges the orthodoxy, risking relationships with people that may help them get their next job.
He excoriated mainstream journalists like Jim Acosta and the Washington Post for whining about Trump's restriction of press freedom. Greenwald should know something about that. He was threatened by the Obama administration, who invoked the Espionage Act against whistleblowers more than all other presidents before him combined, for his Snowden reporting and is currently undergoing criminally indictments from the Bolsonaro government in Brazil for his reporting. What did Acosta and WaPo suffer? Mean tweets?
