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The Handmaid’s Tale: Looking for Tyranny in All the Wrong Places

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22 COMMENTS
 

Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale is a cultural phenomenon. Since the debut of the new Hulu series starring Elisabeth Moss, the novel (originally published in 1985) has earned a new crop of readers, including people who have not yet seen the new web series. I am one of those people.

The world of Atwood’s Tale is a totalitarian Christian fundamentalist nation called Gilead, which was founded after a bloody takedown of the U.S. Government. Gilead enforces Levitical law more literally and brutally that any Jewish or Christian sect in history. Adultery, fornication and pornography are capital crimes, of course, but Gileadeans may even endanger their lives by owning fashion magazines or wearing makeup. Clothing is Taliban-modest and color-coded to indicate the caste of the person donning it.

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Quote of the Day: The Iron Lady Speaks

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“I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.” — Margaret Thatcher

Other than observing that, of course, this trenchant observation can be applied to a wide variety of arguments beyond the stated one (I usually substitute either the word “rational” or the word “thoughtful” for the word “political” when I say it to myself), I don’t think I can improve upon it, or that it needs further clarification or explanation.

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Washington Post Publishes Transcripts of Trump’s Phone Calls

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67 COMMENTS
 

Yesterday, the Washington Post published transcripts of President Trump’s phone calls with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and a different phone call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Ricochet Contributor, John Podhoretz tells us we shouldn’t read these transcripts.

But we shouldn’t be reading them. We really shouldn’t. It’s not because they might be embarrassing to Trump, though they are.

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Quote of the Day: Anniversary

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41 COMMENTS
 

“When you stop chasing the wrong things, you give the right things a chance to catch you.” — Lolly Daskal

I’m not terribly sorry for it, but this is going to be a mushy post. Today is my and my husband’s (@kaladin) wedding anniversary and I already know that so long as we’re both alive, we’ll have as many more as possible. I keep telling him he’d better not die until we make it to 50 years and he tells me that he’ll do his best.

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Hey Jim, You Just Might Be an Ignorant Racist

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31 COMMENTS
 

I’m an Australian. I’m black. I speak English. My extended family is multicultural, including Sri Lankans and Filipinos. They are all Australian. They all speak English.

My medical school had about 40 percent foreign students, mostly from Singapore and Malaysia. They all spoke English. Several of the medical specialists in this country are from India, China, Taiwan, or Sri Lanka… they speak English. I’ve encountered plenty of Pacific Islanders today at work… they all speak English. Three of my former attendings are South African, they all speak English. There’s a great Surgical Fellow I worked with last year, he has since gone back to his home country of India. He spoke English. My former Chief Resident is from Macao… he speaks English.

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ACF#8: Movies, Poetry, America, and Marvel

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17 COMMENTS
 

Hello, Ricochet! It is my pleasure to share my first public lecture on American cinema and society. I’ll start with thanks to my friends Tom Harmon and Matt Peterson, professors at John Paul the Great Catholic University–and, of course, to the university. And to the kids who did the audio-video work with precious little help from me. They’re too young I think for me to buy them a beer, but if they play their cards right… I’ll soon publish the written lecture, which is somewhat different, just in case not everyone wants to watch…

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Summer Reading and Ricochet

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I found out today that we have actual rocket scientists lurking among the Ricochet membership! Being a member of Ricochet means that me… Front Seat Cat, a mere average feline, can share a post with a rocket scientist! Not only that, we have poets, photographers, journalists, teachers, doctors, lawyers (nobody’s perfect), nurses, clergy, TV and talk show personalities, writers, military, comedians, politicians (nobody’s perfect), truck drivers, accountants, financial experts, concrete drivers, chefs, stuntmen (I made that up), farmers, models, people that admire cheerleaders, gardeners, wine and spirits experts (lots of those), and many other amazing personalities and talents.

I can’t believe I can converse with someone from Ireland, Romania, and Paris about religion, politics, or dinner! We have group meet-ups from Thailand to Milwaukee, clubs where like-minded cigar chompers or cat lovers can share interests and photos. There’s a prayer thread if you need a party line to the Creator on your behalf (who doesn’t?) and just personal support. There is no better site out there on the Internet. There are book and movie reviews, audio podcasts, and much more. Additional bonus: The awed and respected “Code of Conduct” means if you act like a schmuck, you’ll be told to cool it in no uncertain terms, (love the lightning bolt) or take your schmuckiness elsewhere. Most folks contain their schmuckiness, but nobody’s perfect…..

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Glenn Reynolds: Instapundit on Media Bias, CNN, Loretta, and Bill

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Glenn ReynoldsGlenn Reynolds is one of the most important folks in the news. He runs Instapundit (now a PJMedia.com property), which provides newsworthy articles and content reported across mainstream media, Drudge Report, and many other outlets. Glenn and his team have a knack for picking the stories he knows people will be interested in. His site, created in 2001, has millions of loyal readers. Glenn is an author and law professor who has written for law reviews at several universities, including Columbia and Harvard. His articles have appeared in all the major daily newspapers as well as Fox News and MSNBC and he is currently a Contributor to USA Today.

On this episode of Whiskey Politics we discuss how media bias has changed reporting, CNN’s Jim Acosta and Stephen Miller, the Ace of Spades article, and the Justice Department redacting the tarmac meeting that took place between Attorney General Loretta Lynch and President Bill Clinton, right before the election.

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Robert Hardy, Friend of Freedom

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Photo: Andrew Crowley
If an actor is lucky they will find that one role that they can really sink their teeth into, make it their own and remain forever seared into the minds of the public. Sir Robert Hardy found that not once, but three times over his illustrious career. He passed Thursday in London, aged 91.

For the younger generation he will be remembered as Cornelius Fudge, the Minister of Magic in four of the eight Harry Potter films. But for us old folks he will always be Siegfried Farnon, the patriarchal head of the country veterinary practice in All Creatures Great and Small and as the definitive portrayer of Sir Winston Churchill. He played the wartime Prime Minister no less than nine times in movies, on television and from the stage.

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Why I Am a Reagan Member of Ricochet

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I have been a member of Ricochet since it started. I signed up for a free test drive through their Facebook membership. By the time that expired I was hooked and signed up. At the time, the hook was a free membership for NR digital. I have let that lapse and I am still here. National Review used to be my go to page for conservative news, but those days passed somewhere during Obama’s second term. Ricochet is where it is at!

The main feed has news and commentary by contributors. It is not comprehensive by any means, but reflects a broad spectrum of conservative and libertarian thought. I am not sure if it is all “center-right” but I am not sure what that means. I do know that I see, intelligent, topical posts by leading individuals. I don’t always agree, sometimes I do, and sometimes it is just worth a laugh. The gems on the Main Feed, though are not from the professionals, they are from the Members.

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The Trump Spectrum

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Inspired by this comment from @jameslileks.

  1. Never Trump: They truly believe he is so awful that even the chaos that would ensue after removing him from office does not outweigh the benefits of said removal. Examples: Bill Kristol.
  2. Anti-Trump: They too believe he is awful, but recognize that we are stuck with him. They may occasionally admit that he has done some good things, but usually only grudgingly. Examples: Mona Charen, John Podhoretz.
  3. Trump Skeptics: They don’t like him, they don’t trust him, but they are trying to keep an open mind. They criticize him frequently but try to keep it constructive. They probably didn’t vote for him but are trying to be gracious losers. Some of them may even concede that the good outweighs the bad but insist that the bad still needs to be addressed. Examples: Ben Shapiro, Most of NRO, I place myself here as well.
  4. Reluctant Trump: They don’t particularly like him, but they think we should give him the benefit of a doubt. They will generally cite Hillary Clinton as their primary (if not their only) motivation for voting for him. Examples: Andrew Klavan, Peter Robinson(?).
  5. Trump Defenders: They admit he’s made mistakes but either think the good outweighs the bad to such a degree as to make the mistakes not worth discussing, or they believe the forces aligned against him are so great that spending too much time on the mistakes is “piling on.” Examples: Victor Davis Hanson, Dennis Prager.
  6. Trump Apologists: The only thing he’s done wrong is not play by The Rules. Everything wrong with the administration is entirely the fault of his enemies. All critics are either pearl-clutching elitists and/or open borders globalists. Example: Sean Hannity.

Resolved: Groups 4-6 have a vested interest in believing that Group 1 is far larger than it really is and that Group 6 is a strawman. Groups 1-3 have a vested interest in the reverse, and I myself am far from innocent in this. As with many questions of this nature, reality is far closer to a bell curve. For both sides to accept this is the first step towards reconciliation.

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Mattress Girl Discredited

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63 COMMENTS
 

If you haven’t heard of the “mattress girl,” it’s not for lack of trying among liberal opinion shapers. Emma Sulkowicz, who dragged a blue mattress around Columbia University’s campus in 2014 to dramatize her plight as a rape victim, was profiled sympathetically in New York magazine, the New York Times and other publications. Senator Kirstin Gillibrand (D., NY) invited her to attend one of President Obama’s State of the Union speeches. Artnet pronounced her mattress stunt (for which Columbia awarded her course credit as an art project) “one of the most important art works of the year,” and she was honored by the Feminist Majority Foundation and other groups.

Her story is this: A consensual sexual encounter with a male student named Paul Nungesser suddenly turned violent. Without warning, he choked her, struck her, and anally penetrated her while she cried out in pain.

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Instead of Cutting Legal Immigration in Half Over a Decade, Let’s Increase It

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132 COMMENTS
 

I want to make sure I understand this. President Trump is supporting an immigration bill from GOP Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue that would replace, as The New York Times explains, “a system that favors family ties in deciding who can legally move to the United States with one based on skills and employability.”

So more a merit-based system that gives an edge to those who have advanced skill and restricts those who don’t.

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20 Things I Learned in Paris

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I was in Paris during the last month for a short period. So that’s in part why I haven’t been writing here. It really is a nice city, especially when mad Muslims aren’t going on a rampage, killing people. Okay, that was unfair … we all know that happens in England now.

Nevertheless it was nice to see Paris, the main city of the first daughter of the Church, and greatest city in the French Republic. Rather than going through what I did there I will instead tell you what I noticed. By the way, it’s not Politically Correct. If you’re easily offended, get lost.

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How ’bout that Mirai Botnet

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Do you remember that thing? It was the panic of the week last fall. Some jerks took large portions of the internet down for a couple hours. Everyone was in a tizzy for a bit. Well, the problem is still there. At least now nobody’s in a flail-your-arms panic over it, so maybe it’s worth discussing solutions.

Since there’s very little reason to remember the panic of the day even a week later, let me remind you how this works. A couple years back “Internet of Things” became the fashionable buzzword, so we all went out and bought WiFi enabled toasters. Now you can start toasting automatically when your alarm clock goes off. The fact that your toast will be ice cold by your seventh snooze is a small price to pay for living in The Future! But when you got your FutureToast, you didn’t bother to change the default password (it’s a hassle and if you did you’d forget the new one and what’s the worst that could happen anyway?) Mr. Nefarious Hacker sees that you’ve got a FutureToast, and he can log into it too. With your toaster and the 13,000 other ones that nobody’s changed the passwords on (and the 3300 GarageNoMores, and 4200 BlindsWithScience, and 132 HubCapConnects) he’s got access to a massive number internet connected devices. Mr. Nefarious Hacker can then use them to form punishing denial of service attacks, making the internet useless to the rest of us.

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World Ends Tomorrow: Women and Gays Hardest Hit

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Sorry about the title. It’s a joke my dad used to tell, back in the ’70s, as the phrase “women and blacks” became an inevitable utterance in seemingly every conversation. But I thought of it when reading and commenting on a long review by Jules Evans of Douglas Murray’s book The Strange Death of Europe. It is a relatively fair-minded piece, but in it Evans nonetheless unselfconsciously exhibits the self-blinkered, weirdly lily-livered relativizing that Murray believes is a (perhaps the?) causal factor in Europe’s imminent “strange death.” One example:

“He reports that in 2009, immigrants were responsible for all reported rapes in Oslo. I was horrified by this. Why weren’t we being told? Was there a politically-correct cover-up? It turned out to be true that from 2006 to 2009, all 41 reported incidents of ‘assault rapes’ (rapes committed by a stranger) were committed by immigrants. But there were many more incidents of domestic rape, committed by Norwegians.”

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The President and the Police

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I have a new column up today over at PJ Media, in which I reject the criticisms of President Trump’s recent speech to police officers in Brentwood, New York. A sample:

In the course of that speech, the president made an unscripted aside in which he made light of police officers being “rough” with people arrested for violent crimes. Borrowing from comedian Jerry Seinfeld, Mr. Trump admonished his audience not to worry about someone arrested for murder hitting his head while getting into a police car. The cops in attendance laughed and applauded, as did I and most cops who watched the speech.

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The Internet, Without the Annoying Parts

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You have things to say.

Sure, Facebook is an option, but the comments are swarmed with angry uncles and cursing nieces who make sure you aren’t invited to the next family reunion. Then there’s Twitter, but you have to distill your opinion on free-market healthcare reform to 140 characters. Of course, your co-workers will take it wrong, block you, and make sure you aren’t invited to the next company picnic.

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