2020 in Photos
- January 13, 2021: Trump’s rally: the media is the dog
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At the Capitol grounds, people are mostly talking about the cold (or heat, depending on whether they were from Florida or Iowa).
I went to DC on Tuesday, January 5, thinking it would be interesting to see a Trump rally, and have some good food in the process. Most of the DC restaurants I enjoyed the last time I was there several years ago seemed to still be open, at least for delivery. And of course I also wandered local bookstores and record stores.
I also expected that the reporting on the event would be vastly different from the experience, and that the difference between what I saw first hand and what the media reported would be interesting.
I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building, to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.
Trump did not incite a riot. He asked us to march peacefully to the capitol, and then if Congress didn’t call for an investigation into fraud, if states didn’t improve their election processes in the future, for us to go home and primary politicians who oppose open elections. And to work for election security in state legislatures. There was nowhere where he asked for, implied a need for, or gave any impression of a desire for, any action other than going home and starting a long term political engagement.
Literally everyone I saw at the rally heard the same thing I did. People who say Trump called for violence have to theorize special mental powers that send invisible commands:
He has a way of inciting his followers to do things…
It reminds me of the quote that if you can hear the dog whistle, you’re the dog.
The thing we adore about these dog-whistle kerfuffles is that the people who react to the whistle always assume it’s intended for somebody else. The whole point of the metaphor is that if you can hear the whistle, you’re the dog. — James Taranto (Lutey Tunes)
Violence is an article of faith with the media that can’t be countered by asking them to actually listen to the speech. But I was there, and listened; his speech was literally the opposite of calling for violence. He said that if congress didn’t do the right thing, we should go back home and primary the hell out of them when they were up for reelection.1
- January 6, 2021: 2020: The Dark Joke Returns
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Today we find out whether enough of our representatives have the sense and the courage to object to the obvious fraud following President Trump’s historic win. The smart money is on no. Swamp dwellers are a bipartisan majority in Washington. But we shouldn’t even be here. None of this is a surprise. We always knew about the fraud in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and other states with fraud centers. We laughed it off.
We made dark jokes about having to overcome the margin of fraud, never thinking that the margin would someday exceed any hope of overcoming.
There are so many things we used to just accept and occasionally make dark jokes about, pretending that if they just keep it from being too obvious, we could pretend it wasn’t there.
How many times have you heard someone say, a big reason Trump won in 2016 was that the left didn’t think they’d need to cheat? And yet still we did nothing. Now we have what seems to be obvious fraud—made all the more obvious by state and local officials refusing to make public the data that would show their elections were not fraudulent.
We can’t accept that any longer. Even here in Texas, if Attorney General Paxton hadn’t fought in court to maintain our election laws, we might be in the same fix as Michigan and the other dark-of-the-morning bump states. State by state, we need to harden our election laws against fraud. To whatever degree possible our election laws must be self-enforcing so that they don’t depend on who is in the Attorney General’s office or the Secretary of State’s office. They must be automatically open so that they can be validated without the need for convincing a judge or a county official.
- December 22, 2020: The Immaculate Deception: The Navarro Report 2.0
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“This report assesses the fairness and integrity of the 2020 Presidential Election by examining six dimensions of alleged election irregularities across six key battleground states. Evidence used to conduct this assessment includes more than 50 lawsuits and judicial rulings, thousands of affidavits and declarations, testimony in a variety of state venues, published analyses by think tanks and legal centers, videos and photos, public comments, and extensive press coverage.”
The Immaculate Deception: The Navarro Report 2.0 by Peter Navarro
- December 2, 2020: The Silver Blaze Media and the Gaslight Election
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This has a been a year of gaslighting. They gaslighted us about churches and Easter meals being a spreader but riots safe. About masks being worthless (at the beginning and for decades before) or being critical (a few weeks in). They gaslighted us about Thanksgiving killing grandma but that nursing homes accepting COVID patients was perfectly safe.
They gaslighted us before the election about how far down Trump was in the polls, then that no fraud happened, and then that not enough happened to make a difference. They are gaslighting us now about whether it’s provable, while blocking any attempt to share provable facts.
The legacy media have gone full gaslight trying to convince us that this unprecedented behavior is normal, that it happens every election, that this is the way elections work.
Like the protagonist in Gaslight, we’re crazy if we remember anything different—if we believe our own eyes and ears and memories.
Michael Anton turns out to have been more right than he could have known when he called 2016 the Flight 93 election. If this much blatant fraud is allowed to succeed, the extremists have chosen to crash the plane rather than let the passengers take over—and not just in Pennsylvania.
Exposing the rot and corruption of the ruling class doesn’t matter if the corruption is allowed to succeed.
My home state of Michigan has long known about the corruption in Detroit. The same appears to be true of Milwaukee in Wisconsin, and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. The dark joke was that any statewide candidate who opposed that corruption had to beat the margin of fraud. The darker joke is that we just accepted it, and tried harder to beat the margin of fraud rather than stop the fraud.
On election night, Trump beat the margin of fraud. By a lot. So they stopped updating, drove observers away, and added more fraud in the dark of the night.
- November 6, 2020: Only what Facebook wants you to see?
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Yesterday I received the following from Facebook because I shared a news story from The Federalist:
Content is being seen by fewer people because it was rated Partly False by an independent fact-checker.
Mimsy Were the Borogoves shared information that’s been reviewed by Reuters Fact Check. We’ve added a notice to the post so others can see that it’s partly false.
Fact check: Biden vote spikes and county recount do not prove Democrats are trying to steal the election in Michigan.
To fight false news, Facebook reduces the distribution of misleading content while also showing additional reporting on the same topic.
The Federalist is hardly a hotbed of conspiracy—in saner times it’d be right down the middle of the road. The “false news” Facebook flagged was that fraud has become pretty obvious in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. The “fact check” isn’t that fraud doesn’t exist, but that it doesn’t prove that Democrats are trying to steal the election in Michigan.1
Michigan is claiming it was a mistake—but not that the mistake didn’t happen.
I’m already seeing others on Facebook denying, not that the lopsided spikes were relevant, or deliberate, but denying that they happened. And why not? Facebook and the rest of the news media is blocking the news that it happened, making the news that it was a mistake irrelevant.
But imagine that the “mistake” went the other way. Imagine Trump votes suddenly appearing on a state’s election site at four in the morning in a red state that Biden had been winning.
- September 30, 2020: The Post Office is not designed for universal mail-in ballots
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Universal mail-in ballots introduce serious problems with security, reliability, and confidentiality that the United States Postal Service is not designed to handle.
Having really old mail be delivered after decades is not as uncommon as it ought to be, but it’s still ironic enough that a postcard from a hundred years ago just got delivered in Michigan, a battleground state—just as judges have started rewriting election law to allow late entries.
Apparently they’re not going far enough. We should continue accepting ballots for one hundred years after election day.
With my favorite annual book sales closing down due to lockdowns, I’ve been buying more books online at AbeBooks and eBay. And so I’ve been paying more attention to the USPS Informed Delivery notices. The behavior of their tracking system doesn’t inspire confidence. Several times I’ve seen a book leave a particular post office, not show up anywhere for several days, and then leave that same post office again several days later. The original leave time disappears, to be replaced with the new leave time. That is, a package that is marked as having left a particular post office at time x will later change to have left at time y a few to several days later with no indication of what happened to previous time x. The earlier time is erased from the system.
That’s not how tracking systems are supposed to work.
Then there are the packages that come reasonably quickly to my local post office… and then go to a city north of me and then to a city south of me before circling back to my local post office again.
There’s a dark joke going around about how you wouldn’t trust the Post Office with your winning lottery ticket, so how can you trust it with your vote? Sadly, some people do trust the Post Office with their lottery tickets, and lose their winnings.
Mail-in ballots multiply the potential for harm through both fraud and error. A few days ago I received the two letters pictured in this post. They weren’t addressed to me; the address was a neighbor’s address. The “voter registration” mail is probably junk mail, but the other mail appears to be real.
And it turns out, that latter mail was not only mis-delivered, it was mis-addressed. The recipient isn’t at the address the government has for them.
- July 15, 2020: Eager to Believe: Stupid Americans and Smart Corporations
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It seemed as though the left’s war against the middle class ramped up heavily during the COVID-19 shutdown. Whether it was denigrating middle-class workers, who are less able to work from home than the information class, or denigrating farmers and gardeners, who recognize that nature cannot be shut down and if you want to eat in the fall you must plant in the spring, they seemed to go all out attacking anyone who pointed out the insane nature of shutting down the very people we need most to help us through a crisis.
But I don’t think any of their social media jibes have been as blatant as this meme about A&W’s third-pound hamburger failure that I saw on Facebook during the shutdown:
“Describe Americans using a single picture”
Me: [photo of a hamburger]
[Text:] In the 1980s, A&W tried to compete with the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder by selling a 1/3 pound burger at lower cost. The product failed, because most customers thought ¼ pound was bigger.1
Another weird thing about Americans is that there’s a special class that would rather believe that the majority of their fellow citizens are uneducated, than that a person—writing an unverified side note in a memoir—might misremember a focus group session from one or two decades past that they didn’t see and no longer have the report on.
Do a google search on third vs. quarter pound burgers, and you’ll see everything from “That’s not how fractions work” to “stop those people from reproducing.” The very article the quote probably came from is a New York Times article from 2014 titled “Why do Americans stink at math?”
- June 13, 2020: My Car My Abortion
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From the “Do they realize” department… does she realize that this is a very powerful anti-abortion message? Until I read the tiny text in the hash tag at the bottom of the sign, I thought it was a pro-life protester. I’m still not absolutely sure it isn’t; I honestly don’t know how Trump has been on abortion and am too lazy to look it up.
If anything encapsulates the pro-abortion movement more than “My Feelings > Your Life”, I haven’t heard it yet.
“My body, my choice” does seem to be where the left’s principles break down—it’s about the only choice they’re adamant about, and it seems to be the most obvious contradiction to what they claim their principles are.
- June 3, 2020: How many fingers, America?
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One day too late for the 2020 Mitt Romney Day awards, I saw this image in my Facebook feed. It is probably the most Orwellian thing I’ve seen so far this year, and perhaps ever.
The two images were captioned with dates across the top, “April 16th 2020 vs. May 26th 2020”. On the one side, the peaceful protests in Michigan several weeks ago—protests that went without violence, but that the left persisted in calling violent and riots.
On the other, the violent riots going on right now, that the left refuses to call riots, and calls peaceful protest.
They’ve even gone so far as to deny that St. John’s Church in DC was burning as the flames rose on their television screens. Even denying violence as the flames rose behind them while they were speaking.
“How many fingers, America?”
We’re asked, as Winston was in 1984•, to believe not our lying eyes, but the lies they tell us. We’re asked to believe that peaceful protest is violence and that violence is peaceful protest. With the images of peaceful protest vs. violence literally right in front of us.
I’ve never particularly liked the slogan, “1984• was not an instruction manual”, but it certainly looks like the press and the left is using it as an instruction manual. The caption to that collage ought to have been,
“How many fingers am I holding up, America?”
Yesterday we were at war with COVID-19/Eastasia. We were told that anyone who massed together would die—or, worse, that they were grandma killers. Today we aren’t even asked to forget it, or to change our mind; we’re just expected to believe that we were always at war with Eurasia and there never was any danger from Eastasia. The one commonality—whether it’s a shutdown or a riot, they don’t really care when other people’s lives are destroyed.
- May 16, 2020: The Jurassic Park shutdown
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This was a very quick response to a Jurassic Park meme, “You know what else was opened before it was ready?” Presumably, comparing people’s livelihoods to carnivorous dinosaurs. Other people’s livelihoods, as the person posting it was a government employee and still had a job.
Ghostbusters and William Atherton: You know what else was shut down by a bureaucrat who had no idea how many lives it was saving?
Mind you, neither of these memes withstand serious scrutiny. But then, you’re not really supposed to think about memes, just regurgitate them. If you find it useful, great; if you don’t, well, you can never go wrong with a Ghostbusters reference.
- April 16, 2020: Mongols and turnips: coronavirus roundup
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Yes, those whiners who want to be able to feed their children while you whine on about needing a total lockdown against a virus that can supposedly be defeated simply by walking six feet away from everybody else.
The Mongol and the turnip farmer
There must be a version of l’esprit d’espalier that describes someone making a social media post you wish they’d made before you wrote your blog post.
The meme went like this: two people on the walls overlooking a Mongol invasion, except that later we discover that the Mongols aren’t there all the time, and some farmer is complaining that he needs to harvest his crops. The other guy says, no, the Mongols will kill you if you try to harvest your crops.
The point of the meme is that it is silly to try to harvest your crops while there might be Mongols outside.
It’s very apt, because in real life, the Mongols got through the walls without any help from turnip farmers. Walls aren’t meant to keep the Mongols out on their own. They’re meant to divert and delay. They’re meant to divert the Mongols to areas more easily defended, and to buy time until we can bring a defense against the Mongols.1
But the crops… the crops are meant to feed us, and without the crops we die.
I will give this meme credit: it neatly encapsulates the tradeoff that I was talking about in Deadly Perfection between the unreasoning fear we’re asked to accept at the cost of the civilization we’ve built. The Mongols are an immediate threat. It might be possible to fight the Mongols hand-to-hand, or to attempt to build up a resistance against them slowly. But the crops are the future. Without the crops, we die when winter comes.
The Mongols are barbarism, the crops are civilization.
The barbarian at the walls isn’t the virus. The virus is the excuse for the barbarians to act. The barbarians are the politicians and the media who want to destroy our civilization. Everything that is made is made for a reason. Every week we don’t build, every week that we let what we’ve made rot for lack of use and distribution, we increase the chances of a deadly winter.
And when people start talking seriously about the tradeoffs involved, and how we’re killing real people in the future to prevent deaths predicted by models that have failed spectacularly, we’re met with fearmongering about Mongols at the walls.
More Live Blog
- 2019 in Photos
- For photos, memes, and perhaps other quick notes sent from my mobile device or written on the fly during 2019.
- 2018 in Photos
- For photos, memes, and perhaps other quick notes sent from my mobile device or written on the fly during 2018.
- 2017 in Photos
- For photos, memes, and perhaps other quick notes sent from my mobile device or written on the fly during 2017.
- 2016 in photos
- For photos, memes, and perhaps other quick notes sent from my mobile device or written on the fly during 2016.
- 2015 in photos
- For photos and perhaps other quick notes sent from my mobile device or written on the fly during 2015.
- Five more pages with the topic Live Blog, and other related pages
Remember: Trump reassures crowd after assassination attempt fails. (read more…)
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