The Last Longest Day - Fernandez

This coming week will mark the 75^th anniversary of the landings on the Normandy beaches. I’ll be posting a few blogs on the landmark remembrance of D-Day. Today, Richard Fernandez at PJ Media) contemplates the historical consequences of the Allied victories:

it is likely to be the last major D-Day anniversary while veterans are still alive.

. . .

Seventy-five years ago, the human impact of the invasion could scarcely be understated. Over 4,400 soldiers died in a single day, the Longest Day, so named in popular culture after Erwin Rommel's prescient observation: "The first twenty-four hours of the invasion will be decisive. . . . For the Allies as well as Germany, it will be the longest day."

It was an all-out throw of the dice. A maximum effort. There was no plan B if it didn't work.

. . .

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.

Less distinct but no less real. . . .

Mr. Fernandez's full article, "The Last Longest Day," is here.

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Progressive Dark Money

Image credit: cincinnati.com

Joe Schoffstall at The Washington Free Beacon reports:

Liberal billionaires George Soros and Scott Wallace are helping bankroll a new fund hosted by an intricate dark money organization and focused on helping Democrats make inroads with midwestern voters for the 2020 elections.

The deep-pocketed donors moved the money from the Open Society Foundations, Soros's foundation, and the Wallace Global Fund, Wallace's foundation, to the newly launched Heartland Fund, a collaborative effort focused on building "power across the divides of the American heartland" as overall Democratic efforts have veered towards the region.

. . .

Future Majority, a Washington, D.C.-based Democratic strategy center, was also founded to focus on midwestern states in an effort to help "rebrand" the party and provide support to liberal organizations. The group is a registered 501(c)4 "social welfare" nonprofit and also does not have to disclose its donors.

Future Majority is planning to spend at least $60 million during the 2020 election cycle and is receiving help from megadonors Philip Munger, son of Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charles Munger, and Dan Tierney, who was the managing director of KGB Holdings, a global financial services company, before it sold in 2017. Munger and Tierney co-chair Future Majority's board.

The headline of this report is “Soros, Wallace Help Bankroll Dark Money Fund Aimed at Midwestern Voters.” Er, Ohio is in the Midwest. Full report is here.

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More censorship at YouTube

Image credit: steemit.com

From Sparta Report:

YouTube is constantly tweaking and changing their algorithm. Most of the time these changes are small and are barely noticed.

Lately, however, YouTubers large and small have been complaining about how little growth their channels have experienced. Apparently, YouTube’s algorithm has been changed to favor mainstream media outlets like CNN over small, independent content creators.

YouTuber Mark Dice reported on this just the other day.

The result is that YouTubers aren’t seeing their channels grow in the way that they should.

Justin Derby of Truth: The Objective Reality has noticed that YouTube’s latest round of censorship means that many YouTubers are gaining more subscribers on their BitChute channels…and he has the evidence to back it up.

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Memorial Day sign

Via social media

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Memorial Day: remembering

photo credit: nbclosangeles.com

We just watched the Memorial Day episode on Watter’s World, and Jesse Watters was doing one of those man-on-the-beach interviews with twenty-somethings. These beach-and-valley boys and girls could not name the country that bombed Pearl Harbor; who we fought in the Revolution; who we were fighting in World War 2; which side won the Civil War; who was US President during WW2, etc etc. Frightening.

We had dinner at our neighborhood pub the other evening, and one of our favorite waitresses asked if we had plans for Memorial Day. We said yes, we were gathering with family for a cook-out and that we would be saluting and remembering our men and women in uniform who gave their lives protecting our freedoms. We had no way of knowing her views, but she immediately responded. She always gathers with her family and she also salutes the military. But she is concerned that younger generations do not know about the sacrifices made by our military to protect America and its allies. We exchanged ideas about how we pass on the war stories to younger generations, but the heartwarming point is that she is very concerned about it and makes it a point to pass on those parts of our history to her kids.  

Happy Memorial Day from Cleveland Tea Party
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As we head into the Memorial Day weekend

Making the rounds on social media:

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“Hate speech” and Facebook

image credit: hubpages.com

Petr Svab at The Epoch Times:

While in the United States, most of what Facebook labels as “hate speech” would be lawful to utter publicly because of First Amendment protections, some European countries have laws against “hate speech,” forcing Facebook to take such content offline. Facebook could theoretically make such content only available to users in locales where it’s lawful, but the company has apparently subscribed to the “hate speech” doctrine, tripling its content policing force to some 30,000.

The document with [Candace] Owens’s name was posted into an internal discussion group set up by former Facebook senior engineer Brian Amerige, who left the company due to disagreements over content policing.

“I’m glad to see the group continues to be used to raise awareness inside the company about Facebook’s slippery slope of a content policy,” he said via the Facebook Messenger app. “In a very sad way, it’s comically predictable to see people listed as ‘extra credit’ to watch and investigate. Evolution into the ‘thought police’ is the inevitable result of their dangerous and ineffective approach to promoting the truth.”

The core issue Amerige hit an impasse on with Facebook executives was their insistence on suppressing “hate speech,” which Amerige deemed misguided.

“Hate speech can’t be defined consistently and it can’t be implemented reliably, so it ends up being a series of one-off ‘pragmatic’ decisions,” he previously said. “I think it’s a serious strategic misstep for a company whose product’s primary value is as a tool for free expression.”

Read the rest of this report here. As Thomas Lifson at American Thinker summarizes:

Facebook is being exposed as a naked propaganda organ that ought to be treated by law as a "publisher" legally responsible for the content it hosts, and not as a "forum" — the status it currently enjoys, exempting it from libel laws and other downsides to the content it spreads out to the world.

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