IN THE MAIL: From David Drake & Jim Kjelgaard, The Hunter Returns.
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Also: Mohu Leaf 50 Indoor HDTV Antenna, $37.99 (58% off). Cut the cord!
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 858.
THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS IS JUST A NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? Hungary braces itself for massive surge of up to 30,000 migrants in just ONE DAY from huge Serbian ‘push through’ – as Germany admits it may take in record one million this year.
SEE, THIS COLUMN ABOUT “THE NEXT GENOCIDE,” KIND OF MISSES THE POINT:
The Holocaust may seem a distant horror whose lessons have already been learned. But sadly, the anxieties of our own era could once again give rise to scapegoats and imagined enemies, while contemporary environmental stresses could encourage new variations on Hitler’s ideas, especially in countries anxious about feeding their growing populations or maintaining a rising standard of living.
The quest for German domination was premised on the denial of science. Hitler’s alternative to science was the idea of Lebensraum. Germany needed an Eastern European empire because only conquest, and not agricultural technology, offered the hope of feeding the German people. In Hitler’s “Second Book,” which was composed in 1928 and not published until after his death, he insisted that hunger would outstrip crop improvements and that all “the scientific methods of land management” had already failed. No conceivable improvement would allow Germans to be fed “from their own land and territory,” he claimed. Hitler specifically — and wrongly — denied that irrigation, hybrids and fertilizers could change the relationship between people and land.
The pursuit of peace and plenty through science, he claimed in “Mein Kampf,” was a Jewish plot to distract Germans from the necessity of war. “It is always the Jew,” argued Hitler, “who seeks and succeeds in implanting such lethal ways of thinking.”
The piece goes on to the usual “climate change” boilerplate, but Hitler’s “limits to growth” attitude presages the modern environmental movement. Norman Borlaug, on the other hand, remains surprisingly unknown, and utterly uncelebrated, by the Greens.
SALENA ZITO: “More than 3 million people didn’t show up to vote in 2012, according to David Leip’s ‘Atlas of U.S. Elections.’ That number was not a show of apathy, but the beginning force of populism that sent a message to the establishment of both parties that neither recognized.”
ROGER KIMBALL: A Word About “Fundamentals.” “It would be cruel to compare Hillary circa 2008 with the bedraggled harridan of today.” It was cruel to let her run. But, then, who could have stopped her?
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KURT SCHLICHTER: The Obnoxious and Important Questions I Would Ask At The GOP Debate.
A LONG, SLOW RIDE TO HELL — AND WE’RE NOT THERE YET: Michael Walsh has a lengthy excerpt from his new book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace at PJM, focused on “the Frankfurt School of mostly German Marxist philosophers, whose destructive, anti-cultural handiwork we can see all around us. For just about every social pathology that currently has Americans and Europeans scratching their heads — how the hell did we get here? — has its origins in the teachings of the Frankfurters and its practical application embodied by the pernicious doctrine of Critical Theory. Destruction of national sovereignty? Check. Redefinition of marriage and the family? Check. Replacement of the Individual-as-Hero with the collectivist ethos of the human ant farm? We have a winner. Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Wilhelm Reich — the list of villains reads like Hell’s honor role.”
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: U.S. drops to 16th on ‘economic freedom’ list, behind Canada, Chile.
A TRAILER PARK CALLED CAMELOT:
Ethel was 40 and three months pregnant with her last child, daughter Rory, when her husband was assassinated. Bobby Jr. was 14, and one week after his father’s funeral, the family celebrated his brother’s 13th birthday. Bobby slipped laxatives into everyone’s drinks as a prank.
“Just leave home!” Ethel yelled at him. “Get out of my life!”
She often used such language with him. “Her moods could swing drastically,” Oppenheimer writes, and soon after, she “literally beat Bobby with a hairbrush.”
Unable to cope with her grief — let alone her children’s — Ethel shipped Bobby off to a series of boarding schools, each less prestigious than the last, each forced to expel the namesake son of a martyred political icon.
Bobby wasn’t even 15 and was already using drugs heavily. He insisted each school allow his pet falcon to stay in his room. He formed a gang, The Hyannis Port Terrors, and one of his favorite practical jokes was bumping the fender of a passing car, having a pal collapse in the road, then yelling, “You’ve killed a Kennedy!” He once spat in a cop’s face.
Ethel did nothing. She was sealed off in her McLean, Va., estate. Only her dead husband, his legacy and her privilege as a Kennedy widow existed. Nothing Bobby did got her attention for long, and that attention was usually negative.
“I never witnessed a civil conversation between Bobby and Ethel,” one of RFK Jr.’s ex-girlfriends told People in 1984.
When Bobby was arrested for buying pot in 1970, Ethel threw him in the bushes. “You’ve dragged your family’s name through the mud!” she yelled. . . .
In his 1994 biography of Ethel, “The Other Mrs. Kennedy,” Oppenheimer writes of her “uncontrolled rage” and the abuse that extended to her household staff. Her brother-in-law Peter Lawford was shocked when Ethel berated a new maid for going to throw out some old scraps of paper.
“You stupid n- - - -r,” Ethel yelled. “Don’t you know what you’re doing? You’re destroying history. Get out of my sight! You’re fired.”
One of Ethel’s secretaries, Noelle Fell, told Oppenheimer she was surprised by such outbursts.
“She would say things like, ‘Those black people are stupid,’ ” Fell recalled. “I really don’t think she liked blacks or Hispanics. She couldn’t stand it if they didn’t speak English.”
One such maid, who brought sanitary pads when Ethel asked for face cream, got a hard slap in the face. She quit on the spot.
Covered up by the press for decades, of course.
VDH ON THE WEARINESS OF THE WHINERS: “The cult of the whining victim is now ubiquitous,” Victor Davis Hanson writes:
The 21st century has become a cowardly era in which we point to collective race, class, or gender rather than own up to our record of behavior and performance when our exalted expectations are not met. Or is it worse than that? Does a Brandon Marshall count on making unsubstantiated charges of racism in hopes of preemptory careerist advantage: one must prove he is not a racist in the future by offering beneficia in the present?
The culprits are not just our obsessions with race, class, and gender, or the careerist aspirations of elites. We also live in the most affluent and leisured era in the history of Western civilization. But given human nature, our bounty has not given us pause for appreciation, but rather increased our appetites in geometric fashion. The more we have, the more we think we deserve — or else. In an affluent society, society can afford now to have no losers. There is enough stuff and praise to be shared by all. In T-ball everyone is a winner; so is today’s student who feels A’s are his birthright. The poor man in the inner city has more computing power in his palm with an Apple smartphone than did the billionaire twenty years ago in his study — but, of course, not as versatile a phone perhaps as that of today’s billionaire, and thus he can legitimately whine that life is not fair due to the machinations of someone else.
The bane of our age is not poverty but parity, or rather the perceived absence of a state-mandated equality of result. It no long matters how much one has, much less in comparison to those abroad or to Americans of our past. The rub is whether someone has something more or better than your own — and why and how that can still be possible in the American horn of plenty. Given those requisites, whininess is the lubricant of our national machinery.
Read the whole thing.
UNEXPECTEDLY! A Hunting Ban Saps a Village’s Livelihood.
Lions have been coming out of the surrounding bush, prowling around homes and a small health clinic, to snatch goats and donkeys from the heart of this village on the edge of one of Africa’s great inland deltas. Elephants, too, are becoming frequent, unwelcome visitors, gobbling up the beans, maize and watermelons that took farmers months to grow.
Since Botswana banned trophy hunting two years ago, remote communities like Sankuyo have been at the mercy of growing numbers of wild animals that are hurting livelihoods and driving terrified villagers into their homes at dusk.
The hunting ban has also meant a precipitous drop in income. Over the years, villagers had used money from trophy hunters, mostly Americans, to install toilets and water pipes, build houses for the poorest, and give scholarships to the young and pensions to the old.
Calls to curb trophy hunting across Africa have risen since a lion in Zimbabwe, named Cecil by researchers tracking it, was killed in July by an American dentist. . . .
“We had a lot of complaints from local communities,” Ms. Kapata said. “In Africa, a human being is more important than an animal. I don’t know about the Western world,” she added, echoing a complaint in affected parts of Africa that the West seemed more concerned with the welfare of a lion in Zimbabwe than of Africans themselves.
This is what happens when you let your policy be driven by “social justice” virtue-signalling, instead of, you know, reason and consideration actual human needs.
UPDATE: Hey, you know who loves H2 visas? Bernie Sanders, the worker’s friend.
FENCE JUMPERS BREAK LEGS TO GET INTO UNITED STATES: “We could spend the whole state budget on the border and I am not sure it would solve the problem,” Arizona state senator tells PJM.
Taking deportation for illegal immigrants seriously might. Or at the very least would certainly be a good way to start.
JOEL KOTKIN: Wave of migrants will give Europe an extreme makeover.
The massive, ongoing surge of migrants and refugees into Europe has brought up horrendous scenes of deprivation, along with heartwarming instances of generosity. It has also engendered cruel remembrances of the continent’s darkest hours. But viewed over the long term, this crisis may well be the prelude to changes that could dissipate, and even overturn, some of the world’s most-storied and productive cultures.
Some may prefer to ignore the long-term impacts of huge migration from the often-chaotic developing world – where 99 percent of the world’s population growth will be taking place – to the more orderly, prosperous and low-fertility richer countries. Separated from the daily drama, the human movement from Syria, the rest of the Middle East and Africa can be seen as potentially changing European society forever by breaking its already-weak Christian foundations and threatening the future of Europe’s elaborate welfare states. In many ways this invokes the vision laid out in the 1973 French novel “Le Camp des Saints,” which envisioned a Europe overwhelmed by a tide of poor refugees.
These concerns, of course, are not simply European. The flow of generally lower-income people from Central and South America has emerged – largely courtesy of the demagogic Donald Trump – as a key political issue in the Republican presidential race. Claims, based on federal employment data, that immigrants have gained far more jobs in the recovery is the kind of thinking that keeps Trump in business. Concerns about other transfers from the Third World to the First World have also surfaced in a host of other countries, including Canada, Australia and even orderly Singapore.
Everywhere that’s a better place to live than where people come from. In Neal Stephenson’s prediction, everything gets smeared around into something that a Pakistani bricklayer would regard as prosperity.
And Kotkin is right about this: “Previous waves of immigrants – including those of the 1960s – entered a confident society with strong values and a decent birthrate. Today, they confront a European society that does not much believe in anything but a post-modernist faith in their own emotions.” That will end badly.
UPDATE: Bottom line:
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Gaps in Alumni Earnings Stand Out in Release of College Data.
The Department of Education calculated the percentage of students at each college who earned more than $25,000 per year, which is about what high school graduates earn. At hundreds of colleges, less than half of students met this threshold 10 years after enrolling. The list includes a raft of barber academies, cosmetology schools and for-profit colleges that often leave students with few job prospects and mountains of debt.
But some more well-known institutions weren’t far behind. At Bennington College in Vermont, over 48 percent of former students were earning less than $25,000 per year. A quarter were earning less than $10,600 per year. At Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, the median annual earnings were only $35,700. Results at the University of New Mexico were almost exactly the same.
The data reveals how much money students are borrowing in exchange for earnings after graduation. While U.C.L.A. and Penn State are both prestigious public research universities, recent U.C.L.A. grads leave with about 30 percent less debt, even as their predecessors are earning about 30 percent more money than counterparts at Penn State. Harvard students borrow barely a quarter of what Brandeis students take on, and earn nearly twice as much.
In other words, a college degree isn’t a generic product, or a magic wealth-enhancer. It matters a lot what and where you study, and when you calculate return on investment, the size of the investment matters as much as the size of the return.
THUNDERBOLT IRON: Anthony Bourdain Melts a Meteorite to Make a Beautiful Blade.
OF COURSE THEY DO: Germany Imposes Border Checks Amid Migrant Wave. I’ll note it’s the SANE thing to do.
A LONG KEPT SECRET: And a gallant lady.
YOU KNOW, IN CASE YOU NEED ONE: Building A Fantasy Army: Leaders.
DO I NEED TO SAY IT: Okay, then. Faster, please. Hidden in Einstein’s Math: Faster-than-Light Travel?
WELL AT LEAST THEY SHOW COURAGE FOR ONCE: WATCH: “I’m My Own Prophet”, Topless Feminists Storm Stage At Muslim Conference.
IN THE MAIL: Clockwork Lives by Kevin J. Anderson and Neil Peart. (I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve rarely seen Kevin — who is a friend — so excited about something he wrote.)
SOMEONE TO SCAM AT YOU: Fake recruiters on LinkedIn are targeting infosec pros.
“They will approach you by sending a general recruiter message with a profile picture of an attractive woman,” he then explained their modus operandi. “The job will be relative to your job. They will ‘scout’ a few people (besides you). After about a week they stop sending out new requests, the profile picture is removed and a bit later their name is changed making it hard to find these people back in your list if its big). In about a month the accounts disappear, not sure if on purpose.”
I THINK HEINLEIN KNEW THE ANSWER: A scarcity of economic growth. From the article: “The causes of the productivity collapse are unclear.”
… if you don’t read Heinlein. If you do, you’ll remember this:
Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as “bad luck.”
YEAH, BUT I STILL WISH WE HAD ONE OF THOSE: Ta-Nehisi Coates: The United States needs more than a good president to erase centuries of violence. Instead, we’ve got Obama, the Worst President Ever.
ANALYSIS: MOSTLY TRUE. The Arab Press Reacts to the European Refugee Crisis: “We are a nauseating nation.” “We too could be like them and our countries could be like their countries, which do not persecute the citizens and do open their arms to the victims of natural and political disasters. Yes, we could be like them if we thoroughly examined our barbaric political regime, our backwards social order, our obsolete curricula, our media that operates without professional norms, and our religious establishment that interprets the texts in a barbaric fashion, inciting to hatred and to abuse of the other, even members of the Islamic faith! This situation clearly mandates a velvet revolution that the educated [sector] must launch.”
EVERYTHING IS POLITICIZED NOW: Secretary of the Navy Insults Marines, Dismisses Study on Gender Integration.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: “The fences are going up all over Europe, we shall not see them torn down again in our life-time.”
THE ENTERTAINMENT VALUE WOULD BE HIGH: Embrace the Suck: Real Possibility of a Trump vs Sanders Race in 2016. And either would be better than Obama has been. But then, so would my cat, and I don’t own a cat.
I LIVE OUT IN THE COUNTY, SO SHE’S NOT MY MAYOR, but Knoxville Mayor Madeline Rogero says that Chilhowee Park isn’t a park, so the guns-in-parks law doesn’t apply:
State law states that someone with a gun carry permit can bring a weapon to a state or city park, if it’s not close to a school.
The Tennessee Valley Fair, however, is making it clear: No weapons will be allowed at the annual event, which begins Friday and runs through Sept. 20. The ban at Chilhowee Park will include permit-holders.
The city of Knoxville and the fair operators argue the law, which Gov. Bill Haslam signed into law in April, does not apply in the case of the fair. Despite the objection of some cities, including Knoxville, lawmakers chose to over-ride local bans to keep guns out of city parks.
According to the city, the park is an “entertainment and public assembly” facility to which the law doesn’t apply.
Besides being kind of cheesy, this is also indicative of an unwholesome prejudice. People with carry permits are very law abiding, and demonstrably less likely to shoot someone improperly than are cops. I suspect that Rogero, who’s a Democrat, is just playing politics here. I don’t know if a court would grant a TRO or not; she probably waited until the last moment with that in mind.
Just remember this when you hear that elected officials have to follow the law. In practice, they pick and choose.
AS DIVERSE AS AN OBAMA SENIOR STAFF MEETING WHEN VALERIE JARRETT IS BUSY ELSEWHERE: Stephen Colbert’s Writing Staff: 17 Men, 2 Women. And all 19 of the Late Show’s writers are white. As racially diverse as a Bernie Sanders rally!
QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Of course, separation of church and state, which ‘Progressives’ love to proclaim, gets a little tricky when the state is your church, and the head of State your God.”
—Scott Ott, in the latest edition of PJTV’s Trifecta.
SO MY AUGUST COLUMN ON the European immigration mess was ahead of the curve. Let me just repeat: “The good news is that immigration concerns aren’t just a problem for the United States. The bad news is that they’re a problem for the entire First World. What to do about it? Nobody seems sure. But although open borders are a nice idea, the fact is that countries differ in economics, in culture and in politics. No country can accept and assimilate an unlimited number of outsiders, and when the number exceeds a threshold, a backlash is certain. Thresholds are being exceeded, and backlashes are building, all over the world.”
UPDATE: Germany Creates A Disaster.
THE INSTA-WIFE: A Brilliant Plan Or A Piece Of Crap? You Decide.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: With Website to Research Colleges, Obama Abandons Ranking System.
President Obama on Saturday abandoned his two-year effort to have the government create a system that explicitly rates the quality of the nation’s colleges and universities, a plan that was bitterly opposed by presidents at many of those institutions.
Under the original idea, announced by Mr. Obama with fanfare in 2013, all of the nation’s 7,000 institutions of higher education would have been assigned a ranking by the government, with the aim of publicly shaming low-rated schools that saddle students with high debt and poor earning potential.
Instead, the White House on Saturday unveiled a website that does not attempt to rate schools with any kind of grade, but provides information to prospective students and their parents about annual costs, graduation rates and salaries after graduation.
On the one hand, this is probably a better approach. On the other, this change is almost certainly because the higher education industry is a key core constituency for the Democrats. And, one suspects, a key source of six-figure speaking fees in Obama’s post-presidency.
JONAH GOLDBERG: In the Left’s Story Of Government, The State Is Always The Hero.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Cancer patient gets 3D printed titanium ribs and sternum.
I HAVE RAISED A SWEET, THOUGHTFUL, ENVIRONMENTALLY CONSCIOUS MONSTER—AND SOON I WILL BE FREE: Glenn already linked to the jaw-dropping article titled “Bidding My College-Bound Son Good Riddance,” written by a veteran Bay Area journalist/environmentalist activist last night, but it’s worth another look for a variety of reasons.
First, modern-day radical environmentalism isn’t that modern anymore — RFK ran on doomsday environmental ads in 1968, and the first “Earth Day” in 1970 was chockablock full of nightmare predictions that never came to pass. As Fred Siegel wrote in 2010 at City Journal in “Progressives Against Progress,” as a result of Earth Day and the like:
Crankery, in short, became respectable. In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim.
And beginning in 1970 with Walter Cronkite and CBS, environmentalist crankery has been very much approved by Big Business for decades. In 2007, GE, which makes a considerable amount of money selling light bulbs, urged its customers for the sake of Gaia to turn off the lights in their homes via the TV network it owned at the time – during halftime of a Sunday night Cowboys-Eagles NFL game whose stadium was bathed in a zillion watts of klieg lights. A couple of years later, American Express was praising would-be California “Dam Busters,” AKA, the people who helped bring you California’s current water crisis. In 2009, James Lileks linked to the following jaw-dropping MasterCard ad:
If they’d intimated that Mastercard can be used to placate your humorless little eco-scold, no one would have minded much. But no: the child is making his father a better man. It’s nice to see that Dad exists in a state of such unearthly perfection that the only means of betterment consist of abjuring incandescent lighting for pig-tailed CFLs, right? Alas: dad is a scoff-law who lets the tap run, uses doubleplus ungood bulbs, and doesn’t correct the clerk when the food is put in a cornstarch bag, perhaps because he’s thinking about his job, the cutbacks and layoffs, the tiresome daily scrum of adult life. He works hard, but of course he could work harder – he has a part-time job so he can stay at home with his son. Mom’s full-time. He downshifted so someone would always be there when Ethan came home from school. This makes him an okay man, I guess.
But he could be better. He could buy a florescent bulb. On credit.
If I had a Mastercard, I’d print this ad out frame by frame and sent it along with my shredded card.
Afterwards, Lileks embedded a frame from the film version of 1984, in which early on in the movie, a nine-year old uniformed “Youth League” member whose father works alongside Winston in the Ministry of Truth blurts out to Winston, “You’re a thought criminal!” Later in the book, after his sister turns in dad for being a thought criminal, he and Winston sit in the white porcelain abattoir-like Ministry of Love awaiting their fates. As dad ponders how many years in a prison camp he faces, he’s proud that he raised that he raised such a good little citizen of Oceania!
‘It was my little daughter,’ said Parsons with a sort of doleful pride. ‘She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? I don’t bear her any grudge for it. In fact I’m proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway.’
How many parents allow their kids to hector them over environmentalist minutia without reminding them who is in charge of the family? Even if you do, how do you raise a kid knowing that they’ll be sent off to school where they’ll hear endless variations of Al Gore-style eco-crankery from their teachers? And assuming you don’t personally buy into the corporatist mantra that “we only have [fill in number of years] to save the planet” — or eco-doomsday is sure to follow — how does a parent counteract such programming?
WAIT, SO HOW WILL I PAY MY TAXES? IRS To Refuse Checks Greater Than $100 Million Beginning In 2016.
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MORE BLOWBACK FOR REP. JARED POLIS (D-CO): His local paper calls his idea to expel innocents a “spectacularly bad idea.” Well, yes. Plus, an actually good idea:
Far from making college campuses less rigorous in their adjudication of such allegations, we propose making them more rigorous by referring all sexual assault allegations to local police and prosecutors for adjudication by the criminal justice system. If a student is guilty of sexual assault, that student should face a penalty worse than expulsion — that student should be subject to all the sanctions of the criminal justice system.
Over and over, college campuses have demonstrated a lack of expertise in pursuing such allegations. It is not, after all, what faculty and administrators are trained to do. Tales abound of athletic departments covering up for star players.
Sexual assault is a serious problem, in society and on college campuses. The answer is not to throw up our hands at the prospect of adjudication and delete all the messy steps between allegation and punishment. The answer is to preserve individual rights through due process, assign such cases to institutions trained to investigate and prosecute them, and punish those found guilty to the fullest extent of the law.
Yes, but that doesn’t support a Hillary-friendly “war on women” narrative, or create more jobs and power for campus (and federal) educrats.
NUCLEAR POWER DOESN’T DEPEND ON WEATHER. I’M JUST SAYIN’. Low Winds In America Cut Wind Power Output. “In the future we won’t just have drought years and hot or cold years. We will also have low wind years. Wind drought? We need a term for it.”
THIS HEADLINE IS DECEPTIVE: One-Third of Americans Would Be Fine with the Military Taking Over.
Here’s the actual question: “Is there any situation in which you could imagine yourself supporting the U.S. military taking over the powers of federal government?”
Is there any situation in which you could imagine yourself supporting is not really the same as would be fine with. Also, it’s an online poll. But the story, by Claire Landsbaum, seems mostly about taking shots at Republicans.
Meanwhile, I’m reminded of The Anchoress’ thoughts on a different kind of coup.
SPYING: Library Will Vote On Giving Patrons Access To Anonymous Tor Browsers.
Hiding from surveillance is a good way to get noticed by law enforcement in the US. Tor, is a free browser tool that sends traffic from a users’ computer through several different servers and machines, making it unclear where the request originated. In light of the revelations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about massive government surveillance of the internet and telecommunications, the Kilton Public Library in Lebanon, New Hampshire became part of the Tor network. This meant some traffic from anonymous users on the Tor network would pass through the computers in New Hampshire, regardless of their point of origin. The Kilton library joined Tor in July. Shortly thereafter, the received an email from the Department of Homeland Security.
Homeland Security contacted the local police department, and police and city officials had a meeting with the library in mid August. In response, the library shut down its Tor nodes. Next week, on September 15th, the Library is voting whether to turn its nodes back on. Apparently, when making their case, police officials discussed the benefits that anonymous browsing can provide to criminals.
First, that’s stupid. Second, so is relying on Tor for any sort of serious anonymity, as it’s not trustworthy.
WELL, THAT DIDN’T TAKE LONG: Germany ‘to reinstate border controls’ as country struggles with influx of refugees.
“At this moment Germany is temporarily introducing border controls again along (the EU’s) internal borders. The focus will be on the border to Austria at first,” he says. “The aim of these measures is to limit the current inflows to Germany and to return to orderly procedures when people enter the country,” he said, adding that this was also necessary for security reasons.
Two thoughts: First, when you tell people from poor countries that the doors are open to rich countries, a lot more will show up than you expect. Second, when your foreign policy is dominated by virtue-signaling and conspicuous displays of “compassion,” it will end badly.
Related: The consequences of Merkel.
IN THE MAIL: From David Weber & Timothy Zahn, A Call to Duty.
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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 857.
MEGAN MCARDLE: How Grown-Ups Deal With ‘Microaggressions.’
We used to call this “rudeness,” “slights” or “ignorant remarks.” Mostly, people ignored them. The elevation of microaggressions into a social phenomenon with a specific name and increasingly public redress marks a dramatic social change, and two sociologists, Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, have a fascinating paper exploring what this shift looks like, and what it means. (Jonathan Haidt has provided a very useful CliffsNotes version.)
Western society, they argue, has shifted from an honor culture — in which slights are taken very seriously, and avenged by the one slighted — to a dignity culture, in which personal revenge is discouraged, and justice is outsourced to third parties, primarily the law. The law being a cumbersome beast, people in dignity cultures are encouraged to ignore slights, or negotiate them privately by talking with the offender, rather than seeking some more punitive sanction.
Microagressions mark a transition to a third sort of culture: a victim culture, in which people are once again encouraged to take notice of slights. This sounds a lot like honor culture, doesn’t it? Yes, with two important differences. The first is that while victimhood is shameful in an honor culture — and indeed, the purpose of taking vengeance is frequently to avoid this shame — victim status is actively sought in the new culture, because victimhood is a prerequisite for getting redress. The second is that victim culture encourages people to seek help from third parties, either authorities or the public, rather than seeking satisfaction themselves.
In other words, it’s the Code Duello, but for cowards.
MORE ON REP. JARED POLIS (D-CO): Mothers of sons falsely accused of rape hammer congressman who called for expulsion of innocents. “Being expelled from college does not simply lead to transfer to another college, as permanent disciplinary records with ominous findings make it difficult or impossible to enter another institution or find employment. Furthermore, the profound and lasting emotional trauma associated with a false accusation, just as for victims of assault, is not a matter to be taken lightly. Many victims of false accusations suffer from PTSD, depression and other health issues as a result of their experiences.”
If you watch the video, Polis’s laugh (at about 1:54) is rather creepy.
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CONGRESS SHOULD MAKE GREATER USE OF IMPEACHMENT AS A TOOL FOR DISCIPLINING LOWER-RANKING OFFICIALS: Lawmaker seeks impeachment of EPA chief. “A resolution introduced Friday by Rep. Paul Gosar calls for the removal of Gina McCarthy as EPA administrator for making false statements on multiple occasions during congressional testimony. The resolution has 20 co-sponsors.”
REMEMBER, SHE ALSO HAD A WHITE HOUSE CONNECTION: Woman who introduced Rolling Stone to Jackie leaves UVA.
Emily Renda, the sexual assault activist who introduced Rolling Stone to “Jackie,” a woman who lied about being gang-raped, has left the University of Virginia.
Her reason for leaving is the fallout from the now-discredited Rolling Stone article. The unraveling of the article, coupled with the attacks on Renda in the media, have led to a year of “all hell and hopelessness.” Renda has decided to go to law school far away from U.Va., and told Vanity Fair that she has abandoned her work with sexual assault survivors.
“I don’t want to say it’s been the worst year of my life, but it has been the worst year of my life,” Renda said.
Renda met Jackie in the spring of 2014, while working as an activist. Jackie told Renda her story of being gang-raped by fraternity members at a party (parts of this story appeared differently in the story Jackie told Rolling Stone). Renda would later share Jackie’s story during testimony before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, omitting Jackie’s name.
Well, it was a pretty bad year for the falsely accused frat guys, too, who suffered a sort of University-sanctioned lynching.
More on the White House connection here:
Emily Renda, a UVA advocate for sexual assault victims, has been identified as the person who helped steer the author of the Rolling Stone article to the student identified in the story only as “Jackie” who said she was gang-raped by seven university students. Ms. Renda had previously met with the White House Task Force to Protect Students Against Sexual Assault, a committee created by President Obama. The administration says it sought her input as a “stakeholder” on the issue. . . .
The U.S. Department of Education has declined to answer Freedom of Information requests for telephone logs and other information that might show to what degree, if any, the White House orchestrated the rape story at a time when it was pushing hard to expand the role of the federal government in combating sexual violence on college campuses. The Institute on Government and Media Integrity has asked Congress to further inquire.
So far, I don’t think UVA is talking, either. In fact: Review of Univ. of Va.’s debunked gang rape to remain under wraps.
An independent review of the University of Virginia’s handling of a student’s gang rape allegations will not be publicly released because of privacy concerns.
The review focuses on the Charlottesville school’s handling of an alleged gang rape that was reported in graphic detail by Rolling Stone magazine. The piece was later retracted.
In an email from the school’s Freedom of Information Act officer late last month, U.Va. rejected a request from The Associated Press to publicly release an executive summary of the review.
The officer cited a letter from a U.S. Department of Education official who said its release would violate the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act.
How convenient for all concerned. Was the official Catherine Lhamon, by any chance?
REPEAL THE HOLLYWOOD TAX CUTS! Although, in the case of North Carolina, it’s a Hollywood Handout.
The program, which last year replaced a more expensive film tax credit, received $10 million in the last fiscal year. The House proposed $40 million annually, while the Senate wanted it kept at $10 million. The state chapter of Americans for Prosperity called the appropriation a “Hollywood handout” and urged email recipients to oppose the spending.
“In lean times for families and small businesses, handing hard-earned tax dollars to Hollywood film executives is reprehensible and irresponsible,” group spokesman Joseph Kyzer said in a release.
Film industry supporters argue movies, TV series and commercials generate jobs that make grant payments a net positive for the state. Film boosters blamed the loss of the tax credit program for keeping productions out of the state.
As I noted in the Wall Street Journal a while back, these things are just cronyism:
Of the nine “Best Picture” nominees in 2012, for example, five were filmed on location in states where the production company received financial incentives, including “The Help” (in Mississippi) and “Moneyball” (in California). Virginia gave $3.5 million to this year’s Oscar-nominated “Lincoln.”
Such state incentives are widespread, and often substantial, but they don’t do much to attract jobs. About $1.5 billion in tax credits and exemptions, grants, waived fees and other financial inducements went to the film industry in 2010, according to data analyzed by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Politicians like to offer this largess because they get photo-ops with celebrities, but the economic payoff is minuscule. George Mason University’s Adam Thierer has called this “a growing cronyism fiasco” and noted that the number of states involved skyrocketed to 45 in 2009 from five in 2002.
In its 2012 study “State Film Studies: Not Much Bang For Too Many Bucks,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that film-related jobs tend to go to out-of-staters who jet in, then leave. “The revenue generated by economic activity induced by film subsidies,” the study notes, “falls far short of the subsidies’ direct costs to the state. To balance its budget, the state must therefore cut spending or raise revenues elsewhere, dampening the subsidies’ positive economic impact.”
Like most government subsidies, these serve mostly to benefit the people who dole out the cash. In this case, it seems largely about letting state politicos hobnob with Hollywood types and feel special.
WALKER ABRUPTLY CANCELS APPEARANCE AT CALIFORNIA GOP CONVENTION: AS Stephen Kruiser writes, “Republican candidates don’t schmooze the California GOP for votes, electoral or otherwise. They come here for the same reason Democrats who are assured of winning here do — money. There are a lot of big donors here to court, and it probably isn’t a good sign that Walker is canceling.”
TIME TO WET THE BED: The Hillary campaign should start panicking, Matthew Continetti writes at the Washington Free Beacon:
In early July, during another rough patch for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, Dan Pfeiffer took to CNN to reassure his party. Pfeiffer used to be President Obama’s top communications aide. The title of his op-ed was “Stop the bed-wetting: Hillary Clinton’s doing fine.” Bed-wetting, Pfeiffer explained, “is a term of art in Obamaland.” Ah, the president and his acolytes. Such sophisticates.
Clinton shouldn’t panic, Pfeiffer argued, because she remains ahead in polling and in fundraising, because Bernie Sanders “is not Barack Obama,” and because “Hillary Clinton circa 2015 is not Hillary Clinton circa 2008.” Elections, after all, “are about fundamentals,” and “the fundamentals point to a decisive if hard fought victory for Clinton.” Of course, “A lot can change in the coming months.”
No kidding. As we enter the fall campaign season, Pfeiffer’s case seems laughably self-assured and unpersuasive. Now is precisely the time for Clinton and her team to wet the bed—indeed, they may already be doing so.
But won’t wetting the bed risk shorting out the advanced microprocessors inside the exoskeleton?
THE TRUTH ABOUT DONALD TRUMP’S GOLF GAME (VIDEO): “We already have a bad golfer in the White House. Can we survive another?”
Heh. If you liked the Attaaaaaaaaack Waaaaaaatch videos poking fun at our current duffer in chief, you’ll like this one.
LET US STOP PRETENDING THAT THE IRAQ WAR WAS THE WORST THING EVER. Especially when, as Glenn has pointed out on numerous occasions, regime change in Iraq was a bipartisan issue from the 1990s until, oh, about the time Saddam was captured in late 2003, and that Joe Biden and Barack Obama were taking credit for Bush’s winning of the surge as an election year talking point in 2012.
Given Iraq’s current state, perhaps someone should ask Colin Powell if he still thinks you, “you break it, you own it” applies to the current administration, now that he’s an Obama Democrat.
THE FAILURE OF SWEDEN’S IMMIGRATION POLICY: Look North, Chancellor Merkel.
SAY SEE IT WITH GRAPHS: From Madisonian Constitutionalism to Wilsonian Statism?
WHO CREATES THESE DEFINITIONS: A Toast to Reasonable Drinking.
RUPERT MURDOCH OWNS THE WORLD: Or at least the part of it with exotic bare breasts.
INSOMNIA THEATER (BACK TO SCHOOL EDITION!): BRAINWASHING PROGRAM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE—This week’s edition takes us back to 2007, when the University of Delaware’s Office of Residence Life used mandatory activities to coerce students into changing their thoughts, values, attitudes, beliefs, and habits to conform to a specific university-approved social, environmental, and political agenda. After FIRE waged a campaign calling attention to the Orwellian curriculum, the university terminated the program, effective immediately. Since that initial victory, however, there have been continued attempts to reinstate the coercive elements of the program. This video explains the program’s invasive thought-reform activities; the horrified reactions of students, faculty, and the press; and FIRE’s response.
If you want to learn more, you can also check out this award-winning article by Adam Kissel. The program was so bad I even devoted nearly an entire chapter to it in my book Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate.
ANOTHER IDIOT SELF IDENTIFIES: Daniel Craig ‘duped’ into political donation.
IT’S NOT THE CRIME, IT’S THE HYPOCRISY: Lawyer who accused barrister of ‘sexism’ has described men online as ‘hot stuff’. It’s almost like these cries of “sexism” are just a means to power.
ENGLAND, LESS CRAZY THAN CALIFORNIA:Right to die: MPs reject assisted dying law. (There is no way for assisted suicide laws NOT to be abused, particularly when they intersect with a state health system.)
THEY’D NEVER DO THE EQUIVALENT IN A MOSQUE: Sunderland priest’s disgust after burglars urinate in church’s holy water. We all know why. Beware the incentives this creates.
WHEN POLITICS TOLD THEM THEY WERE VICTIMS: When did women become such whingers? Accepting compliments appears to be a woefully lost art.
WHAT A BRAVE NEW WORLD: Are supermarket shelves sexist, or do we need to stop being so easily offended?
Latest in the seemingly endless list of “stuff you never knew was sexist, but is” comes, of all things, where the supermarket chain Morrisons stacks New Scientist magazine on its shelves.
HILLARY CLINTON’S MALE VOTER PROBLEM. “Clinton is also getting swamped among Democratic men. She trails among them 48-29, while leading among women by a similar margin, 49-35.”
Hell, she couldn’t even ensure Bill’s loyalty.
YOU DON’T SAY: ‘‘Harvard is turning out generations of high-powered leaders who think feminists are extremists.”
MESSING WITH THE FABRIC OF TIME: If you’re into DIY music recording, I have a review of Eventide’s H3000 Factory Harmonizer plugin at the PJ Lifestyle blog.
AND NOW REUTERS DELIVERS THE REST OF THE STORY ON THAT SYRIAN TEAR-JERKER: Syrian toddler Aylan’s father drove capsized boat, other passengers say.
The father of drowned Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi was working with smugglers and driving the flimsy boat that capsized trying to reach Greece, other passengers on board said, in an account that disputes the version he gave last week.
Ahmed Hadi Jawwad and his wife, Iraqis who lost their 11-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son in the crossing, told Reuters that Abdullah Kurdi panicked and accelerated when a wave hit the boat, raising questions about his claim that somebody else was driving the boat.
A third passenger confirmed their version of events, which Reuters could not independently verify.
“The story that (Aylan’s father) told is untrue. I don’t know what made him lie, maybe fear,” Jawwad said in Baghdad at his in-laws’ house on Friday. “He was the driver from the very beginning until the boat sank.”
He said Kurdi swam to them and begged them to cover up his true role in the incident. His wife confirmed the details.
Jawwad said his point of contact with the smugglers was called Abu Hussein. “Abu Hussein told me that he (Kurdi) was the one who organized this trip,” he said.
So at least as much of a perpetrator as a victim.
WELL, MAYBE JUST WITH A CLOTH: Tech company: No indication that Clinton’s e-mail server was ‘wiped.’
BACK TO THE FUTURE! “So your roleplaying game campaign is in flames,” Moe Lane writes at the PJ Lifestyle blog. “Is it time for a retcon?”
Hey, if Democrats can go back to the future with retread politicians like Hillary, John Kerry, Joe Biden, and Bernie Sanders, why not RPGs?
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: 13-year-old boy kissed 14-year-old girl on a dare. Now he faces assault charges.
SO THE INSTA-WIFE AND I MOVED A SOFA TODAY, and there was a nasty coffee stain under it. The Bissell Spot Cleaner removed it completely. That thing has paid for itself many times over. Together with the Barkeeper’s Friend and the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, it’s part of my hypermasculine cleaning arsenal.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Bidding My College-Bound Son Good Riddance: I have raised a sweet, thoughtful, environmentally conscious monster—and soon I will be free. Your son sounds like an idiot. I hope he grows out of it.
HMM: Oxygen on exoplanets isn’t proof of life.
The Earth’s atmosphere contains oxygen because plants continuously produce it through photosynthesis. This abundant supply of oxygen allows life forms like animals to flourish. Therefore, oxygen had been thought to be an essential biomarker for life on extrasolar planets.
But now, a research assistant professor Norio Narita of the Astrobiology Center of National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS), which was founded in April 2015, and an associate professor Shigeyuki Masaoka, of the Institute of Molecular Science of NINS, have presented a novel hypothesis that it could be possible for planets to have large quantities of abiotic (non-biologically produced) oxygen. This study is a good example of interdisciplinary studies that combine knowledge from different fields of science to promote astrobiology in the search for life on extrasolar planets. The study is published in Scientific Reports on Sept. 10, 2015.
Until now, it had been thought that if a planet has oxygen, that must mean that some form of plants are producing it through photosynthesis. Therefore, it had been assumed that when searching for signs of life on habitable extrasolar planets, the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere could be considered a definitive biomarker.
However, non-biological chemical reactions can also affect atmospheric compositions of extrasolar planets. Now, the research team led by Dr. Narita has shown that abiotic oxygen produced by the photocatalytic reaction of titanium oxide, which is known to be abundant on the surfaces of terrestrial planets, meteorolites, and the moon in the solar system, cannot be discounted.
For a planet with an environment similar to the sun-Earth system, continuous photocatalytic reaction of titanium oxide on about 0.05 % of the planetary surface could produce the amount of oxygen found in the current Earth’s atmosphere. In addition, the team estimated the amount of possible oxygen production for habitable planets around other types of host stars with various masses and temperatures.
So we have abiotic hydrocarbons on Titan, and we can have abiotic oxygen on other planets. This doesn’t precisely support the theory that oil on earth comes from abiotic processes, but. . . .
BRENDAN O’NEILL: A compliment isn’t misogynistic. Why can’t feminists understand this? “What must the veiled, subjugated women of genuinely patriarchal societies in the East and South think when they see a free, well-connected woman in the West scream ‘misogyny!’ over a compliment? They must feel pretty lonely, knowing they’re unlikely ever to win solidarity from such sorry, self-obsessed excuses for feminists.”
If you understand that feminism is, in part, a leveling mechanism used by less-attractive women against more-attractive women, it will make sense.
LEFT BEHIND: Thinking of Mom every day, not just Sept. 11.
FALSE AND DEFAMATORY: Daily Kos Founder Claims Contributor at Daily Kos Is a ‘Breitbart Writer Arrested for Terrorism.’ “He linked to an article that made no mention of Breitbart. But it did list the publications that this terrorist troll, Joshua Goldberg, wrote for, including… the Daily Kos. . . . Moulitsas then, bizarrely, went on to claim that ‘trying to incite terrorism’ was ‘a conservative thing.’”
UNEXPECTEDLY! Report: Iran finds ‘unexpectedly high’ uranium reserve after Dems seal nuke deal for Obama.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Another female coach with a female student. “I want you to 50 Shades me.”
Remember, male teachers are rare because people fear they might be sexual predators.
AT AMAZON, Editors’ Picks: Best Toys & Games of September.
Plus, 20% off Kohler Kitchen & Bath fixtures. And 15-20% off Pfister Bath Fixtures.
LOONY LEFTIST ELECTED LEADER OF UK’S LABOR PARTY: Rick Moran writes that “a little known, back bencher, an avowed socialist named Jeremy Corbyn…wants to return his party to the Disco era.”
I doubt there’s another Thatcher waiting on the other side this time, though.
WHY IS MODERN ART SO BAD? “Something happened on the way to the 20th century,” artist Robert Florczak deadpans at Prager University. “As with most revolutions, the first generation or so produced work of genuine merit.” Yes, modern art – and pop art, including music – only works when it has a traditional culture not only to push against, but to draw technique and style from. Once you banish the past, where do you go for inspiration?
(Via Gerard Van der Leun.)
IT’S COME TO THIS: Salman Rushdie: Trump Should Be “Eradicated.”
So Is Rushdie proposing a fatwah on a best-selling author, bon vivant and media figure for his impure thoughts?
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Peering Into Nanoparticles One at a Time Reveals Hidden World.
IS OUR CHILDREN LEARNING? Americans Swore They Would ‘Never Forget 9-11.’ But College Students Asked Why It Happened Have No Idea:
And speaking of forgetting history that the world promised it would “Never Forget:”
But hey, history is so problematic anyhow — we wouldn’t want to trigger any ill-feelings amongst our delicate young students.
UNIVERSITIES RECOGNIZE RIGHTS TO EVERYTHING, NOWADAYS, EXCEPT FREE THOUGHT: University of California considering recognizing a “right” to be “free from … expressions of intolerance.”
PREDICTABLE: Obamacare Enrollment Tumbles as Huge Price Hike Looms.
In its latest enrollment report, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services says 9.9 million were still enrolled in ObamaCare exchange plans.
That’s almost 2 million fewer than the administration claimed in the spring, when it bragged that 11.7 million had signed up, and way below the Congressional Budget Office’s earlier forecast of 13 million.
And if this year is anything like last year, that 9.9 million will dwindle further as the year goes on. . . .
Earlier this year, insurers started putting in rate requests for 2016, and in many cases they were gut-wrenchingly high — with some above 50%. Obama told the public not to worry, that state insurance regulators would knock them down to size.
But like every other promise he’s made about his namesake law, this one was phony.
In state after state, insurance commissioners are approving huge rate hikes, based on the fact that the people who’ve signed up for ObamaCare are older and sicker than insurers hoped.
By one estimate, the average rate hike in Oregon — a state that eagerly embraced ObamaCare — is above 24%. Average approved rates are 20% or higher in Alaska, Idaho, Iowa and Kansas.
An analysis by Agile Health Insurance found almost a third of all plans being sold through the federal Healthcare.gov exchange — which covers 36 states — had double-digit rate hikes.
This is why we passed a partisan law and divided the country– a mere increase in 9.9 million new private insurance enrollees, who are forced–at the pain of a mandatory tax–to buy increasingly expensive insurance? It’s not even close to the “universal” coverage the Democrats touted.
If this is President Obama’s “legacy”–combined with the so-called Iran “deal”–this is pitiful.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “U.S. universities have grown increasingly reliant on rapid, double-percentage-point-per-annum growth in the number of students from China, who now account for 31 percent of international students in American higher education.” Plus: “I think there is a sense in the U.S. that universities have taken the Chinese student enrollment levels for granted, that they’re able to charge significant tuition and somehow this growth will continue into the future unimpeded. I just don’t believe that.”
Well, you know what they say: Something that can’t go on forever, won’t.
