DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: After Ouster From Deanship For Representing Harvey Weinstein, Law Prof Blasts Harvard’s Capitulation To A ‘Loud Minority Of Students.’
THEY GO WHERE THE MONEY AND POWER ARE: Estimated 10,000 people in DC are spies.
HONG KONG PROTESTS: Activists praised for clearing away rubbish and parting crowds for ambulances. ‘Two million people marched here yesterday, it was occupied all night, and there isn’t a scrap of rubbish on the road.’
Thomas Friedman, hardest hit.
CLIMATE DENIERS: The Seattle Times Story on Massive Heat Wave Deaths in Seattle: Does it Make Sense?
On Friday, the front page of the Seattle Times had a terrifying story about Seattle heat waves that could kill hundreds— in fact, over 700 per event. One suggesting that only by rapidly cutting greenhouse gas emissions, might our fellow citizens be saved.
Their online headline deepened the angst, telling us that Seattle was “unprepared” for the “deadly heat waves” that were being stoked by global warming.
As I describe in detail below, there are profound issues with that paper and with the Seattle Time article that promoted it. And as I will discuss, such poor journalism and problematic papers have the potential to undermine progress in dealing with the actual threats accompanying global warming.
Much more at the link.
WHY IS THE LEFT SUCH A CESSPIT OF DOXXING? “Doxxing” of a Bronx Man Shows News Media at Its Worst. “The scariest part of the whole matter might be recent reports rolling in that Facebook helped The Daily Beast’s reporters track the man down.”
RICK MORAN: Are Hong Kong’s Days of Freedom Numbered?
THE RESPECT GOVERNMENT DESERVES: Pakistan government meeting streamed on Facebook Live with cat filter turned on.
UAW LOST CHATTANOOGA VW PLANT VOTE, AGAIN: It kind of got lost in news, but on Friday night VW workers at the German auto giant’s Chattanooga, Tenn., plant again voted against forming a UAW-affiliated union.
As LaborPains noted, the margin of victory for the anti-union forces was slightly smaller this time than in 2014, but the defeat was still a loss and came after the UAW spent who knows how much on its campaign:
“Regardless of whether you were pro- or anti-UAW, local news reports made clear it was impossible to miss the union’s message in Chattanooga. The union’s lavish spending on television, radio, digital and even gas station advertisements ensured that workers were well-educated on what they were voting for (or against) this week. A pro-union reporter even suggested that the city was “mobilized” in favor of the UAW.”
TRUE: ‘Latinx’ is not a word in Spanish and Hispanics will never accept it as one. “Progressives have now decided that the binary nature of Spanish is incompatible with wokeness and they intend to bury what they believe is a remnant of colonial patriarchy. Since there is no discernible limit to what the far Left is willing to do in the name of equality of outcome, everything is on the table. In Latin America, there are now efforts on college campuses to upend the entire Spanish language.”
DON SURBER: A party run by children.
AOC and her ilk want reparations. Now! AOC and her ilk want open borders. Now! AOC and her ilk want their student loans erased. Now! AOC and her ilk want gun confiscation. Now! AOC and her ilk want the end of coal, oil and gas. Now! AOC and her ilk want whatever they want, and they want it now.
They view America as genocidal, racist, sexist, Islamophobic and ignorant.
The problem is most Americans know the facts. They not only reject her views but laugh at them.
Nevertheless, Democrats are stuck with delivering on these nutty promises.
Read the whole thing.
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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump Fires His Leaking Pollsters. “Do you ever see these kinds of shenanigans coming from the Democrats: people supposedly ‘on their side’ sabotaging their candidate or their president with leaks? No, we see people ‘on their side’ lying under oath to protect their candidate, we see them smashing phones to hide evidence, deleting emails after they were subpoenaed, or even using the government surveillance apparatus in the service of ‘their’ side. Maybe the internal saboteurs aren’t really on our side? It’s worth a thought.
NEWS YOU CAN USE? How to Make Jim Acosta Cry.
YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION: Denver council member wins with promise to impose communism ‘by any means necessary.’
WOW: Researchers convert Type A blood to universal donor blood in scientific breakthrough. “The new study could double the amount of universally accepted blood available for transfusions.”
Give blood if you can — more is always needed.
A PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION: Fired Black Law Professor May Sue D.C. Law School.
FBI LOVEBIRDS: UNDERCOVERS: Had its (conservative) audience howling with laughter at its premiere at Washington’s Ronald Reagan Center.
ROBERT “BETO” O’ROURKE CALLS FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF THE OIL INDUSTRY ON NPR:
Democratic candidates generally don’t have much to fear from interviews on National Public Radio, but Morning Edition anchor Steve Inskeep raised our eyebrows by pushing Beto O’Rourke a bit on Friday on what people will be forced to give up under liberal climate-change policies. The liberal media often focus on the Impending Crisis, and then go light on how liberals would crack down on “bad” behaviors.
Online, the interview carried an “idealistic” headline:
Beto O’Rourke Calls For A ‘Moonshot’ To Combat Climate Change
But the moonshot comment wasn’t included in the on-air interview. Online, they reported O’Rourke told NPR “We’ve called for … an investment commensurate with John F. Kennedy’s moonshot.”
* * * * * * * *
Inskeep asked about Texas oil, but O’Rourke said Oil is Done-zo:
INSKEEP: Your state’s big industry — oil — is going to be fine?
O’ROURKE: My state’s big industry is going to have to transition into its other big industry. We generate more wind power than any other state in the union. As we free ourselves from that dependence on fossil fuels, we’re going to see more of my fellow Texans and fellow Americans transition into renewable energy jobs; high-demand, high-skill, high-wage occupations.
To build on our post last night on Bernie Sanders, and thus, O’Rourke has his equivalent of Sanders refusing to tell Fox’s Chris Wallace yesterday that he’s against nationalizing utilities, banks and major industries. And Obama and Hillary’s promises on the campaign trail to put the coal industry out of business, not to mention AOC’s disastrous original “Green New Deal” outline calling for the elimination of public air travel. The left’s motto in 2020? Ban all the things!
THEY’LL PUT Y’ALL BACK IN CHAINS: Beto Tells Black Leaders They Need Protection ‘From their Own Country.’
O’Rourke has gained a special insight on race relations, having spent years as a mock-Hispanic.
IF EVER I BRING THIS MUCH HAPPINESS TO THE WORLD, I WILL BE SO VERY PROUD OF MYSELF: On this day in 1903, Ruth Graves Wakefield was born. Bless her soul: She was the inventor of the chocolate chip cookie.
BABYLON BEE: Not to be Outdone, Elizabeth Warren Promises to Cure Smallpox: “‘We will fend off the smallpox attacks of the white man,’ she said while sipping ‘fire water’ in a live video posted to her social media accounts. ‘If I am elected, I will find a way to end this scourge on our people and send the white devils back across the great sea where they came from.'”
June 16, 2019
THE DARK NIGHT OF FASCISM IS ALWAYS DESCENDING UPON THE UNITED STATES, AND YET LANDS ONLY IN EUROPE:
Shot: Hillary: Circumstances of Trump’s America ‘more dangerous’ than Hitler’s Germany (VIDEO).
—Campus Reform, Wednesday.
—The London Daily Mail, yesterday.
(Classical reference in headline.)
ELUSIVE VIRTUES: Read the whole damn thing.
Why do some parts of the world seem to defy efforts to achieve any degree of unity and peace? Not just for years or decades but for generations and as long as anyone can remember. The worst of these nations (like Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya and Somalia) seem to actively avoid peace, prosperity and unity and finding solutions for their problems seems futile. But when you step back and take a closer look you find that all these countries have lots in common, aside from being “failed states.”
The answer? It’s KO, not a TKO.
I’M SO OLD, I REMEMBER WHEN LEFTISTS DISAPPROVED OF WHITESPLAINING: Beto Tells Black Leaders They Need Protection ‘From their Own Country.’
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Media’s NXIVM Case Coverage — There’s No Such Thing as ‘Brainwashing.‘
UPDATE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARIES ACCORDINGLY: Father’s Day Updated To ‘Toxic Masculinity Awareness Day.’
Note to Snopes: This is a headline from the Babylon Bee, so it’s satire — or is it?
ARE DISNEY AND NBCUNIVERSAL RISKING THE ALIENATION OF CONSERVATIVE TOURISTS?
As a former cast member at the Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park, the fact that Disney in particular is joining in the boycott is very disappointing, and CEO Bob Iger has put himself in an impossible position by saying it would be “very difficult to do business in Georgia,” mentioning that a lot of people who work for the company don’t like it.
It’s possible that he’s talking about the mainly left-wing executives at the company, including Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn. If that’s the case, so be it. But with all due respect to Iger (and I have a lot of it as a Disney shareholder and a longtime fan), he might want to think about alienating conservatives by caving into pressure from his Hollywood peers. It could be very bad for, not only the movie studio, but the theme parks as well with new themed areas based on the Star Wars franchise opening at Disneyland and Disney World this summer.
Visit Disneyland and Disneyworld while you can — there’s a good chance areas such as Liberty Square and Main Street USA will be radically transformed and/or airbrushed into oblivion in the coming decades.
Related: Walt Disney: American Dreamer (Video).
IN THE NEAR FUTURE, YOU COULD BE SEATED IN AN AIRPLANE’S WINGS. Why not? This is the 21st century you know, and the CAD/CAM mockup of a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines passenger flying wing atop this Week article looks pretty sharp.
Related: Fast days on the Concorde: Rock stars, wine & the ‘11-mile-high club.’
Like manned moon landings, it’s frustrating to think of supersonic passenger flight as something that only occurred in the past. Faster, please.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Snowflakes Triggered by Calorie Count Exam Question.
The un-PC exam question:
“There are 84 calories in 100g of banana. There are 87 calories in 100g of yogurt. Priti has 60g of banana and 150g of yogurt for breakfast. Work out the total number of calories in this breakfast”.
The correct answer is, “I’m triggered.”
At Oberlin, that’s the correct answer to every question on an exam.
(Via Maggie’s Farm.)
HOW CORY BOOKER’S DOT COM GET RICH QUICK SCHEME COST HIM 2020:
Cory Booker is polling at 2% in New Hampshire. Even in South Carolina, what ought to be his strongest state, his numbers dropped, cut in half, to 4%. His RCP average is equally miserable.
His fundraising lags behind all of the major candidates. And even one of the minor ones.
Waywire may help explain why.
Back in the day, Booker boasted of how easy it was to raise $1.75 million for Waywire because of the “power of the idea”. The idea however, like so much of digital publishing, was silly. The aspiring politician tapped into resources he would have needed now in the hopes of getting very rich.
Instead, he miscalculated. Badly.
Since then, the former darling of Silicon Valley has reinvented himself as an unconvincing critic of the industry. But every Booker reinvention is equally unconvincing. And nobody buys it anymore.
Tear into it like “Spartacus” unsealing some already cleared for release old Brett Kavanaugh documents, and read the whole thing.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: What is Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome?
The Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome is a disease common among Americans that is caused by arrogance, egotism and nonchalance. Carriers show a penchant for obliviously overlooking the obvious while delighting themselves at the cost of others. Delirious OTS sufferers refuse to acknowledge their malady and will argue that it is their God given right as an American to travel freely about the world with little or no conscience or consequence. OTS people frequently hide behind their Bill of Rights and Constitution. Unfortunately, there is no cure for OTS nor is there any way to ease it’s symptoms. It is a disease which, no matter how much hard data and facts are introduced into the OTS sufferer, will not ease unless said sufferer finds a compass of morality and humanity.
See also: The New Republic’s useful idiot tour. Why not take a trip to Raúl Castro’s Cuba?
‘To live in Havana’, Graham Greene once wrote, ‘was to live in a factory that turned out human beauty on a conveyor belt.’ To work as Cockburn does, as an underfed Grub Street hack, is to work in an industry that turns out pointless emails on a conveyor belt.
Every now and then though a real diamond rolls out of the coal chute. On Friday The New Republic invited its readers on a Caribbean jaunt – to Raúl Castro’s Cuba. Under the heading ‘Discover Cuba and Support the Cuban People’ the email read:
‘While Trump petulantly restricts travel to Cuba, The New Republic invites you to discover the culture, society and politics of the island, and most of all bolster the people of Cuba when they need it most.’
The people of Cuba – or at least the military caudillo and his thugs who keep people of Cuba garrisoned – have, incidentally, been busy ‘bolstering‘ the Maduro government in Venezuela.
And then afterwards, why not take the New York Times’ trip to Iran, to see the handiwork firsthand, of the mullahs?
Americans in Iran are generally regarded with a degree of skepticism, but not for the reason you might think. Iranians want to know what you’re doing in Iran, not because they suspect you of plotting a coup, but because they know American passport holders could spend their vacations anywhere else on earth (give or take a few tin-pot communist police states), and feel sorry for you. They are almost always friendly and eager to tell you there are no hard feelings. “Ninety percent of Iranians love America,” is a widely cited statistic, though it’s not clear if this is based on actual data. Eventually, this becomes rather eerie, as if everyone is reading off the same approved script.
Nazri, a student studying computer animation, offered the boldest riff on the “We love America” line, leaning in close to whisper “and Israel,” though I am not convinced this is a 90-10 issue. Moments later, a mullah in a black turban strolled by and leered in our direction. “Very dangerous,” Nazri said after he passed. “I f—king hate them.” Also, can I get him a job in California? Not everyone is so gracious toward Americans. A few (say 10 percent) of the locals, mostly older men, simply said, “Okay,” and sauntered away after I told them my nationality.
Talking to locals seems to always paint a slightly different picture of the country than the one we received from our guides on the bus. One day I stumbled upon a coffee shop run by Armenian Christians. The barista disagreed with Cyrus’s assessment that religious minorities were valued members of Iranian society, and could practice their faith openly without harassment. “No, it’s not good,” he told me. “If I could, I’d leave.”
Why is exactly what Otto Warmbier thought, when he discovered, the hard way, the limits of Omnipotent Tourist Syndrome.
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE AND THE ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: D.C. Circuit: Black Law Professor Ostensibly Denied Tenure For Lack Of Scholarship May Sue D.C. Law School.
NO BIG DEAL, JUST A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE REFUSING TO SAY THE GOVERNMENT SHOULDN’T TAKE OVER MAJOR INDUSTRIES: “‘Fox News Sunday’ host Chris Wallace asked Sen. Bernie Sanders about a quote of his from the 1970s in which he says he favors public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries. Naturally, he obfuscated and refused to say he is against such a takeover.”
Given that as candidates, Obama in 2008 and Hillary in 2016 both gleefully discussed putting coal mines and their employees out of business — and received no pushback whatsoever from the DNC-MSM – “Bernie’s Strange Brew of Nationalism and Socialism,” as Kevin Williamson aptly described Sanders’ worldview in 2015, isn’t too far removed. It’s long been the stuff of Salon.com fantasies and more recently, AOC’s “Green Nude Eel,” of course.
TWITTER IS A VIRUS OF THE MIND: An excerpt from Glenn’s new book, The Social Media Upheaval.
CHRONIC CONFLICT IN THE GLOBAL WORLD: RIGHT AT YOUR DOORSTEP OR ON YOUR COMPUTER. “Fears that the Gulf of Oman will be the new Gulf of Tonkin are unlikely to come true. It is much more probable that Iran’s decades long low-intensity war with the US will continue as usual. Iran killed 600+ US troops during OIF, a fact downplayed by the previous administrations. But if that fact didn’t drive Trump to go openly kinetic, a few more attacks on third country tankers are unlikely to.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN INTERSECTIONALITY: “Queerness is incompatible with capitalism.”
Historically, it’s always been infinitely more incompatible with totalitarian socialism (and/or vice-versa), but forget it, he’s rolling.
JOYOUS NEWS FROM THE NOTRE DAME CATHEDRAL: “The historic Notre Dame cathedral will see its first Mass celebrated since almost being destroyed in a fire on April 15th of this year…The Mass will be celebrated by the Archbishop of Paris for a small group of twenty people or so, all of whom will be required to wear hard hats while in the damaged church.”
Photos here: Priests in hard hats hold first mass in Notre Dame Cathedral two months after devastating fire.
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JOEL KOTKIN ASKS: What is social justice?
The deepest blue cities — San Francisco, New York, San Jose, Los Angeles and Boston — may be ruled by social justice activists but, according to Pew research, suffer the largest gaps between the bottom and top quintiles. Long-standing minority communities like Albina in Portland are disappearing as 10,000 of the 38,000 residents have been pushed out of the historic African-American section. San Francisco’s African-American black population is roughly half that of the 1970s, constituting less than 5 percent of the city’s population. More than half of the Bay Area’s lower-income communities, notes a recent UC Berkeley study, are in danger of mass displacement.
A direct result of climate policies, high energy prices place enormous burdens on California’s working-class families, particularly in the less temperate interior. These policies also discourage growth of manufacturing and other blue-collar industries that long incubated opportunities for working people. As the state’s manufacturing sector has stagnated last year while industrial jobs expanded 14 percent in neighboring Arizona, 5 percent in Nevada and by 3 percent in arch-rival Texas.
Regulations in California have also slowed construction growth, and left employment considerably below the industry’s 2007 numbers. Residential sales have dropped statewide, and California’s rate of new housing permits has fallen behind the national average, making construction workers’ economic prospects even dimmer.
The diminishing prospects in these blue collar industries, as well as high housing costs, may do much to explain why so many minorities, and immigrants, are increasingly migrating away from multi-culturally correct regions like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco for less regulated, far less woke places like Phoenix, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, Atlanta and Las Vegas.
Billionaire GOP contributors and libertarian-types like the Koch Brothers really need to get going on Glenn’s Welcome Wagon idea.
DISPATCHES FROM THE PARTY OF YOUTH: Andrew Ferguson on the “Tyranny of the 70-Somethings — The Democratic Party’s gerontocracy is holding back the political causes it claims to want to advance.”
PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Former Democrat turned conservative gay rights activist slams Pride, sues LGBT Center.
According to a complaint filed Friday in Manhattan Supreme Court and exclusively obtained by The Post, the LGBT Center in Greenwich Village discriminated against Straka by canceling his 250-person WalkAway event “LGBT TownHall” in March, days before it was scheduled to take place.
The event was to feature Straka and a panel of two gay men and a transgender woman talking about why they left the Democratic Party.
“I’m considered a traitor. [The community] wanted to silence me, they wanted to roll over me and make me disappear,” said Straka, who is seeking $20 million in damages.
Read the whole thing.
(Classical reference in headline.)
IN THE MAIL: The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life.
TECH DISASTER: Massive power failure in Argentina and Uruguay.
THE TWITTER MOB COLLECTS ANOTHER SCALP: GOP congressman nixed as keynote speaker for cybersecurity conference. “Black Hat hosts high profile global events that strive to ‘bring together the best minds in the industry.’ Except, apparently, pro-life cybersecurity experts. Zack Whittaker, a security editor for Tech Crunch (and CBS alum, according to his Twitter profile) posted a tweet showing [Texas GOP Rep. Bill Hurd’s] voting record calling it ‘a terrible voting record on women’s rights.’ Whittaker did, however, acknowledge that Will Hurd is one of the few lawmakers who ‘get’ cybersecurity…Something that Whittaker failed to reference, though, is the founder of Black Hat’s support for Hillary Clinton in 2016 as she ran for president. He hosted a fundraiser for her during a hacker conference in Las Vegas. She’s the acceptable kind of politician, you see. It’s just really all too much, even by 2019 standards.”
THE TRAFFIC STOP: One of the Great Abuses of Police Power in Contemporary Life. Historian Dan Albert on an Obsolete Enforcement Practice That Just Won’t Die.
Read the whole thing.
ANDREW KLAVAN: Conservatives Have To Be Fearless In The Face Of Leftist Censorship.
The corporate media — including social media — are now engaged in a full-fledged and collusive attempt to silence conservative voices in time for the 2020 election. On Sunday, just as YouTube was threatening to pull down thousands of “hateful” (i.e. conservative) videos, the New York Times printed a breathless and idiotic piece supposedly charting a YouTube viewer’s descent into right-wing radicalism.
How radical did this poor radical soul get from watching conservative videos? Well, okay, he “never bought into the far right’s most extreme views, like Holocaust denial or the need for a white ethnostate… “ But, “he began referring to himself as a ‘tradcon’ — a traditional conservative, committed to old-fashioned gender norms. He dated an evangelical Christian woman, and he fought with his liberal friends.”
The horror. The horror.
This suspiciously timed piece — clearly designed to give cover to YouTube’s censorship plan — featured a collage of faces of right-wing radicals. These included such raving hate-filled alt-right evil-doers as mild-mannered gay centrist Dave Rubin and of course Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro — whom various left-wing outlets have repeatedly identified as the one and only orthodox Jewish Nazi in all the universes!
But while branding Dave and Ben alt-right may be absurd, it’s not unintentional. It is part of a strategy. 1. Convince people that hate speech should be silenced. 2. Define hate speech as alt-right. 3. Label powerful mainstream conservatives “alt-right.” 4. Silence powerful mainstream conservatives.
5. Convince people that the late Milton Friedman(!), a Nobel Prize-winning economist, is the new Emmanuel Goldstein, the gateway drug to the alt-right, and the chief hoarder and wrecker blocking the glorious path to “Fully Automated Luxury Communism.”
JUST NBC THE CONSPIRACY MONGERING: Today Show Earns All-Time Ratio For Tweeting There’s ‘Debate’ Over Vaccines.
How bad was it? “Before it was deleted, at one point the tweet had more than 1,800 comments and just 38 likes.”
Related: Jessica Biel Says She’s ‘Not Against Vaccinations’ After Lobbying with Anti-Vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
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SJW LOGIC VS. COMMON SENSE: No wonder Oberlin got socked with a huge punitive damages award for libeling a local bakery as racist after detaining students who wound up pleading guilty to shoplifting. Here’s Oberlin’s litigation position, from its court filings: “Gibson bakery’s archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests. The guilt or innocence of the students is irrelevant to both the root cause of the protests and this litigation.” Get that? Whether the students accused of shoplifting had actually been shoplifting or not was irrelevant to whether it was fair to accuse the store of racism etc for detaining the students as shoplifters. The fault lay with the bakery owners for daring to actually stop and prosecute shoplifters!
This is the kind of b.s. that gets you A’s at Oberlin with a certain type of SJW professor, but that normal people rightly think defies common sense. But it can pay off in academia. A very prominent law professor got an Ivy League job after writing a silly book which, among other things, argued that whether the Al Sharpton-promoted Tawana Brawley hoax was true or not was besides the point, because the real issue was whether society was silencing African American girls like her who surely had something bad happen to them.
GREAT MOMENTS IN INTERSECTIONALITY: Infuriating: Who knew plastic straw bans could lead to stories like this one, except everybody?
At least in Austin, the P. Terry’s Burger Stand chain, with their colorful midcentury modern Googie-influenced buildings, has the right idea: for everyday normal people, the plastic straw dispenser is fully loaded, but there is a “paper straws available on request” sign at the cash register, for those wishing to virtue signal their eco-wokeness.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: The Long Road To The Student Debt Crisis.
FORTY YEARS OF DARKNESS! EARTHQUAKES, VOLCANOES! THE DEAD RISING FROM THE GRAVE! HUMAN SACRIFICE, DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER — MASS HYSTERIA! Green New Deal advocates: “Pipeline and resource development leads to man camps, human trafficking, and child-porn rings.” And these people want to govern a nation…
(Via Small Dead Animals.)
HAPPY FATHER’S DAY! I hope all of you Dads enjoy your day and do something fun! You deserve it.
MAYOR PETE ON TAX CUTS: ‘The Reagan Neo-Liberal Era is Now Over.’ “For 90 percent of Americans, you start the clock right around the time I’m born. Income didn’t move at all — so lower to middle income, really, almost all of us…And what we’ve learned is that supply-side idea that you just cut taxes and make the rich better off and it will find its way to the rest of us is wrong and the Reagan neo-liberal era is now over,” he added.
Shades of Time magazine Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stenographer Charlotte Alter’s cri de coeur in March that:
“People our age have never experienced American prosperity in our adult lives—which is why so many millennials are embracing Democratic socialism” (emphasis mine). Alter also claims that Ocasio-Cortez’s “adulthood was defined by financial crisis, debt & climate change. No wonder she and her peers are moving left.”
[As David Harsanyi responded,] The idea that millennials have toiled in uniquely grueling economic conditions exhibits a delusional and extraordinarily narrow understanding of history. Whether the majority of millennials believes this myth or not, I don’t know. I tend to doubt it. Alter is just repeating AOC’s contention. But, historically speaking, the only thing millennials have seen is relative prosperity, most of it provided by free markets and American political stability.
But does Buttigieg support AOC’s risky 70 percent income tax scheme* to pay for the Green New Deal?
VIRGINIA CLOWN SHOW UPDATE: Northam Lawyer to Host Buttigieg Fundraiser.
JACK DUNPHY: As Summer Shooting Season Commences in Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot Picks a Fight with Police.
Appearing on a local cable news show on May 30, Lightfoot made the astonishing allegation that the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police, the union representing rank-and-file officers, had instructed its members to be passive when dealing with crime over the Memorial Day weekend. “But you know,” she told interviewer Ken Davis, “there were rumors floating around about — and I didn’t verify this — but rumors floating around that they were telling their officers, ‘Don’t do anything. Don’t, over Memorial Day weekend, don’t intercede. If you see some criminal activity just lay back, do nothing.’ I hope to God that wasn’t true because, man, oh man, if that happened, there’s going to be a reckoning.”
There’s going to be a reckoning, all right, Madam Mayor, it just won’t be the one you thought it would be.
As Rudy Giuliani knew, and as Lori Lightfoot does not, it takes a motivated police force to take the steps necessary to drive down the level of violence seen in Chicago. “Cops count,” as William Bratton has preached for years, but in order for them to make a difference, they have to have the expectation that if they act within the law and department policy, their superiors and their city government will back them when controversy arises. Cops in Chicago have no such expectation, and it appears unlikely Mayor Lightfoot will even try to instill one.
Chicago’s last Republican mayor left office in 1931.
WHAT THE HELL HAS BEEN GOING ON AT BOEING? Pilots reveal safety fears over Boeing’s fleet of 787 Dreamliners.
Meanwhile over at the Grauniad, “Jeremy Corbyn says there is ‘no credible evidence’ of Iran’s involvement.”
DISPATCHES FROM GROUND ZERO OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: With a Huge Punitive Damage Award, the Oberlin Verdict Becomes Even More Meaningful.
Second, the size of the jury award will create a legal market for litigation. There’s a relatively simple reason why campus free-speech codes proliferated well before there was a concerted legal counterattack — money. It takes money to sue universities, and First Amendment cases simply don’t yield eye-popping jury awards. It took the creation of large networks of nonprofit, pro-bono lawyers to turn the free-speech tide on campus.
Common-law torts are different. Plaintiffs can receive real compensation, and universities have deep pockets. In a radio interview yesterday, I compared the verdict to the kind of sound that causes prairie dogs to stand alert — suddenly, lawyers are paying attention:
It is true that vexatious defamation suits can be used to punish lawful speakers, but many states have erected statutory guardrails to protect defendants against frivolous litigation. In addition, the First Amendment properly provides extremely robust protection for speech directed at public figures such as politicians, celebrities, and journalists. The fact remains, however, that outrage campaigns are often built on lies, and that when adults irresponsibly or maliciously spread those lies, the law has long provided a remedy.
Critics are already decrying the “chilling effect” of the Oberlin verdict. To the extent that the verdict causes activist administrators to pause and consider the underlying veracity and merit of the public campaigns they’re asked to join, then this is one chilling effect that may well do some good.
I hope they rain fire and brimstone, to coin a phrase.
June 15, 2019
FLASHBACK: Remember InstaPundit In Your Will!
BIDEN VOWS TO RETURN NATION TO ERA WHEN PRESS DIDN’T BOTHER REPORTING ON PRESIDENT’S SCANDALS.
Note to Snopes: This is the Babylon Bee, so it’s satire — or is it?
MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO TRUMP: CNN’s Jim Acosta recalls ‘quaint’ Romney gaffes, including one that wasn’t a ‘gaffe’ at all:
For many voters on the Right (myself included), the “binders” moment served as further proof that it does not matter who the GOP submits as its presidential nominee. He can be as kind and decent as Romney, and Democrats and their allies in the press will still savage him as a retrograde monster, grinding him into dust with a relentless torrent of attacks and criticisms. And if Democrats and their supporters cannot find legitimate controversies with which to destroy the GOP nominee, they will simply concoct them from thin air, as they did with “binders full of women” and similar episodes of ginned up outrage. It makes sense, then, that Trump’s inability to feel shame, coupled with his love for fighting with journalists, appealed to the same people who watched in dismay in 2012 as their perfectly honorable candidate was torn to pieces by the White House and the press.
“Romney ran a hard-fought, respectable race,” Acosta recalls in his book, referring to the former governor as a “thoroughly decent human being” with “good manners.”*
Is that so?
Because that most certainly was not the message voters received in 2012, back when Acosta and others were busy obsessing over supposed “gaaaaaaffes” committed by the man who threatened to deny their beloved Barack Obama a second term in office.
Choose the form of your destructor, to coin an Instaphrase.
* Curious how Republicans invariably get rehabilitated by the DNC-MSM as wise elder statesmen to bash the current Republican in office, assuming that the public has forgotten the previous smears.
DAVID LIMBAUGH: Leftists Declare Fundamental Moral Questions Beyond Debate.
Or to put it another way:
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GLENN REYNOLDS’ SOCIAL MEDIA UPHEAVAL MAKES THE CASE FOR TRUST-BUSTING BIG TECH COMPANIES:
Reynolds has a deceptively simple prose style that he’s perfected at Instapundit. There, he’s the master of the understated quip used to accompany his links to the news and opinion of the day (mostly from a conservative-libertarian slant). At first glance, a Reynolds’s remark often seems merely to display a firm grasp of the obvious. In fact, on first read, these can seem like bromides of prosaic pabulum.
But in every case, there’s an underlying irony or twist of meaning that cuts deeper. Sometimes Reynolds can be quite profound while masquerading as the village simpleton, like a blogging Diogenes in a barrel. And you ignore a longer Reynolds homily at your peril. He employs the same style for The Social Media Upheaval:
The ‘marketplace of ideas’ approach to free political speech has always relied on a wide variety of different views from a wide variety of different speakers, many of which will inevitably be wrong or even dishonest. The presumption is that, overall, truth will win out most of the time. The danger of monopoly organs like Facebook or Twitter is that they will selectively silence some of those voices and amplify others. Encouraging these tech behemoths to police ‘bad’ content only makes that more likely.
To allow the free market and a resurgent American educational establishment to one day ride to the rescue, what we need at present is a president or attorney general in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt, argues Reynolds. This should be someone who will go after the monopolies in the same spirit the monopolies are going after the rest of us: mercilessly.
Related: What Is To Be Done About Facebook?
EVEN AS THE US ECONOMY PRODUCES MORE JOBS AND HIGHER WAGES, SOMEHOW CAPITALISM STAYS BROKEN. WEIRD:
Today’s populists overindulge in unwarranted economic nostalgia. For them, the immediate postwar decades were when America was really great. But maybe it’s a more recent period that they should be pining for. If you’re trying to make the case that “capitalism is broken,” then the Great Recession of 2007-2009 was your big moment. Capitalism seemed shattered, not just broken. It looked like this sucker was going down, to paraphrase President George W. Bush.
But then the economy started to recover, slowly but steadily. Indeed, the US expansion hit the 10-year mark this month and is on the verge of its longest-run on record if things stay on track through July. An economy that’s producing gobs of jobs every month — a total of 20 million since 2010 — as it grows year after year is a dodgy example of broken capitalism.
But there will always be leftists, particularly journalists, oddly enough, with a severe case of “Depression Lust,” as Virginia Postrel dubbed it in December of 2008.
AND THE ANSWER IS NONE. NONE MORE WOKE: Emma Thompson’s Woke Late Night Grabs Gold In Victimhood Olympics.
UPDATE: “Unexpectedly,” Late Night didn’t grab the gold at the box office this weekend, either — despite Amazon spending nearly $50 million promoting the film:
Amazon’s Late Night, another misfire in the indie female cinema space with $4.7M after the studio spent $13M for the pic at Sundance, and from what we hear, another $35M in marketing. Poor results for a film with good exits of a B+ CinemaScore and an 80% on PostTrak from the core female 25+ audience, who showed up at 52%. Amazon observed weeks ago that Late Night was going to tank on tracking, with a $4M-$5M opening. They attempted to shift at the last minute by bowing the film in NY and LA last weekend, and notched the best specialty release theater average opening of $61.5k to date this year. Even though Amazon largely respects theatrical windows (that’s going to change with its awards season push for another Sundance pick-up, The Report, this fall), if you think about it, Late Night is an advertisement for Amazon Prime, because that’s the end game for this Mindy Kaling Working Girl comedy. It may also be one of the key reasons why people aren’t rushing out to it.
No, as Christian Toto notes in above, there are all sorts of reasons why people aren’t rushing out to see it.
THE POWER LINE SHOW, EP. 129: Cocktails From Hell, a podcast interview with fellow Insta-co-blogger Austin Bay.
THAT’S NOT CREEPY AT ALL: O.J. Simpson joins Twitter, says ‘I got a little getting even to do.’
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Team Beto: The Media Is BS Now, Man.
Still though, we’ll always have the Clash: “Beto has now resorted to telling reporters that London Calling by the Clash changed his life. He was in a punk band, remember, he’s still cool, remember. The irony there is that phony Betomania has bitten the dust.”
HAVE I MENTIONED THAT I HAVE A NEW BOOK OUT? Don’t just sit there, buy a copy. And maybe one for your local library.
NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: The Rise of Progressive Occultism — Or why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez felt compelled to share her birth chart.
For an increasing number of left-leaning millennials—more and more of whom do not belong to any organized religion—occult spirituality isn’t just a form of personal practice, self-care with more sage. Rather, it’s a metaphysical canvas for the American culture wars in the post-Trump era: pitting the self-identified Davids of seemingly secular progressivism against the Goliath of nationalist evangelical Christianity.
There’s the coven of Brooklyn witches who publicly hexed then-Supreme Court candidate Brett Kavanaugh to the acclamation of the thousands-strong “Magic Resistance”—anti-Trump witches (among them: pop singer Lana del Rey) who used at-home folk magic to “bind” the president in the months following his inauguration.
Although “progressive occultism” isn’t an entirely new a development — Sally Quinn, then-married to Washington Post maximum editor Ben Bradlee, was playing with “Ouija boards, astrological charts, palm reading, talismans,” and casting spells she believed to be lethal since the late 1960s.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: An Unhelpful Study about Women in Physics.
Regarding item 3, what constitutes “suggesting people of your sex or gender are not as good at physics or math”? If people have literally said “Women can’t do physics” then they should apologize and change. On the other hand, suppose that a peer mentions arguments from James Damore’s controversial memo on gender gaps in STEM. Damore repeatedly rejected blanket statements about women, emphasizing the wide ranges of interests and abilities in both sexes (see, for instance, the figures at the top of page 4 of the memo). Nonetheless, reporters at leading newspapers have characterized him as arguing “that maybe women were not equally represented in tech because they were biologically less capable of engineering.” Since even journalists with professional obligations to check printed statements against original sources mischaracterize Damore’s detailed, footnoted memo in this way, it is quite possible that a student would similarly misinterpret offhand summaries of such arguments. Still, it would not follow that the physics community is a hotbed of sexism; it would simply mean that physicists should reflect on how to better approach difficult conversations.
Regarding item 4, how do people know that treatment is unequal and due to gender? Yes, sexist treatment does happen, and it is never acceptable. However, too many people have said “they’d never do this to a man” about things that routinely happen to men. For instance, a woman professor has lamented to me that a man delivered a soliloquy about how terrible his professors were when he took classes on her subject (at a different university), and suggested that everyone in her field should follow his suggestions for improvement. She took this to be a classic example of “mansplaining.” Alas, non-physicists—of both sexes!—routinely tell me (a cisgender male) what was wrong with their high school or college physics classes. What she regards as mansplaining, I experience as a daily occupational hazard.
Conversely, it’s entirely possible that the survey respondents have experienced unambiguously unequal treatment. Unfortunately, we don’t know what that mistreatment is or who perpetrates it. Do we need to admonish male students to let female peers participate as equals in study groups? Do we need to train laboratory instructors to give equal attention to men and women as they troubleshoot equipment? Or do we need to fire department heads who only bestow plum research opportunities upon men? We lack sufficient information to take targeted, relevant, and effective steps.
Read the whole thing.
OH, TO BE IN SAN FRANCISCO IN THE SPRINGTIME: Heat wave left Baker Beach in SF swamped with 3 dumpsters worth of trash.
Temperatures made a rare midsummer surge into the 90s in the Bay Area earlier this week, and as San Franciscans flocked to Baker Beach to cool off, they left behind a trail of trash. Lots of trash.
“Baker Beach was one of several park sites with excessive trash due to the additional visitation. For every full can, there were at least three times as much trash overflowing next to it,” said Shalini Gopie, a spokeswoman for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
Park maintenance workers ultimately collected 60 cubic yards of trash from Baker Beach, according to Gopie — enough to fill three large dumpsters, she said.
“The park did notice less garbage in park areas where trash cans were limited,” said Gopie.
Some people posted photos of the striking trash mounds to Reddit, prompting venting from commenters frustrated with the park visitors for failing to take their trash with them when they leave.
“People are terrible,” wrote user YikingViking.
“Then they proceeded to go home and post about how filthy our city is on social media,” wrote user ericgtr12 of the litterers.
To be fair, not every large gathering is as civic minded and cleanly as those deplorables in the San Francisco Tea Party movement.
JOHN MCWHORTER ON ATONEMENT AS ACTIVISM:
[T]oday’s “woke,” educated white people would quite often lap up being apprised of the racism inside of them by a black speaker they paid, lodged, and fed. That speaker as often as not today is Ta-Nehisi Coates, who charismatically limns America as a cesspool of bigotry in his writing and in talks nationwide, and is joyously celebrated for it by the very people he is insulting.
Coates is a symptom of a larger mood. Over the past several years, for instance, whites across the country have been taught that it isn’t enough to understand that racism exists. Rather, the good white person views themselves as the bearer of an unearned “privilege” because of their color. Not long ago, I attended an event where a black man spoke of him and his black colleagues dressing in suits at work even on Casual Fridays, out of a sense that whites would look down on black men dressed down. The mostly white audience laughed and applauded warmly—at a story accusing people precisely like them of being racists.
This brand of self-flagellation has become the new form of enlightenment on race issues. It qualifies as a kind of worship; the parallels with Christianity are almost uncannily rich. White privilege is the secular white person’s Original Sin, present at birth and ultimately ineradicable. One does one’s penance by endlessly attesting to this privilege in hope of some kind of forgiveness. After the black man I mentioned above spoke, the next speaker was a middle-aged white man who spoke of having a coach come to his office each week to talk to him about his white privilege. The audience, of course, applauded warmly at this man’s description of having what an anthropologist observer would recognize not as a “coach” but as a pastor.
Similarly, in the first edition of Jonah Goldberg’s new email-only “Pirate G-File,” Jonah writes:
If you listen to The Remnant podcast – back next week by the way – you know I’m obsessed with a theory of contemporary politics. We live in one of the most partisan times in American history. No, it’s not as partisan as the 1850s or even the 1960s (thank God). But the difference between now and those periods is that partisanship is running white-hot even as the parties themselves have never been weaker.
Partisanship is now a lifestyle choice as much as it is a political or ideological orientation. That’s one reason politics are so ugly these days. When the political is personal and the personal is political, political disagreement feels like a personal attack. Politics today increasingly takes up the space in our brains normally reserved for religion, which is why there are houses in my neighborhood where people post signs listing social justice nostrums like they were Martin Luther’s 99 Theses.
While Nietzsche assured the Jurassic “woke” class of the late 19th century that “God is dead,” most of the branches of the “Progressivism” that followed are forms of a substitute religion to fill the void. (See also: radical environmentalism and even socialist health care.) As the late Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN PROGRESSIVE PARENTING: Gun Advice from the Worst Column Ever.
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PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● Shot: CNN: Of course we don’t hate Trump or favor Democrats.
—Jazz Shaw, Hot Air, Thursday.
● CNN’s Camerota: ‘It’s Our Job’ to Teach Viewers To ‘Shut Down’ Conservative Arguments.
—Joseph Chalfant, NewsBusters, Friday.
And if necessary, doxx those making them sufficiently that they don’t ever try to repeat them again.
THE MLK STORY NO ONE WANTED TO READ:
This punch-in-the-gut article undoubtedly knocks the wind from its author most. David Garrow, who won a Pulitzer for a biography of King, boasts membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, and remains, alongside Taylor Branch, the most acclaimed biographer of the civil rights leader, undoubtedly becomes not only part of the story — a fate dreaded by historians — but a villain in it. Most U.S. press outlets ignore his shocking research. The Washington Post, which rejected his article, focuses not so much on his revelations but the critical reaction to them in its story, “‘Irresponsible’: Historians Attack David Garrow’s MLK Allegations.” At its conclusion, Garrow displays a naïveté in answering whether he worries about the publication damaging his reputation. “No,” he maintains. “Not at all. I think that’s impossible.” In the final line of his article published by the UK’s Standpoint magazine, Garrow writes that some aging King scholars — he is only 66 — may not live to see the 2027 release of the transcripts and audio, suggesting a motive for releasing an article on the summaries now before others get the jump on the information or before the grim reaper gets the jump before 2027.
The King revelations reveal several curious inflection points of the 21st century American elite left. In March Star Parker noted that “The Left’s Identity Politics Rejects the Vision of Martin Luther King Jr.,” and as Garrow told Dominic Green of the London Spectator at the beginning of the month, “the King transcripts are not about race. They are about the abuse of male power,” a topic that’s been at the forefront of the American left since the fall of 2017. But the DNC-MSM would not give Garrow’s revelations traction, because, Green writes, “Garrow alleges that the editors are afraid of being attacked as racist by Twitter mobs — a theory that seems to be confirmed by the Post’s attack on Garrow,” adding:
We might add that King is sacred to liberalism — perhaps so much a saint that the prelates of the press are covering up his feet of clay. Whether caused by misplaced paternalism, cowardice, or simple partisanship, this is a dereliction of journalistic duty. It’s hard to imagine the same newspapers demurring from running transcripts involving Richard Nixon or Donald Trump.
While lesser figures can be easily consigned by the left to the permanence of the Memory Hole, it’s understandable that the media refused to do the same to King’s reputation. as one of Rod Dreher’s readers wrote, “I hope Dr. King remains celebrated; I also hope that his sexual behavior (again, assuming this story is true) is not forgotten. And in the future, when someone on the Left advocates the abolition of Columbus Day, or the taking down of monuments to Washington or Jefferson or many less well-known figures, I hope that people bring up Dr. King, NOT in the spirit of ‘Whataboutism’, but in order to remind them that there is no incompatibility between celebrating the achievements of people in the past and acknowledging that those people had – as we all do – major flaws.”
WILL THE LAST PERSON OUT OF THE BAY AREA PLEASE TURN OFF THE AL GORE CURLY FRY ECO-BULB? I’m SFGate’s ‘Bay Area exodus’ reporter. Now I’m leaving myself.
THE ROOTS OF ELITE EUROPEAN ANTI-ZIONISM:
The official music video for “Hatrio Mun Sigra,” the Icelandic submission to this year’s Eurovision song contest, included real leather, fake blood, and strobe lights, one part Studio 54 remake and one part zombie Backstreet Boys apocalypse. Like most reveries dreamed up by overeducated, artistically inclined youth it landed with a thud, too breathless and mirthless to deliver real shock. The heavily publicized Icelanders lost.
Not that the band didn’t try hard: As soon as they were selected as their nation’s emissaries to the popular continental competition, held last month in Israel, Hatari—the name means “haters”—challenged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a wrestling match, promising, should they win, to replace the Jewish state with a republic dedicated to sexual kinks. When that provocation, too, failed to elicit more than a chuckle, Hatari delivered its showstopper: As the points were being tallied, the band’s members flaunted the contest’s no-politics rules and waved red, white, green, and black scarves emblazoned with the word “Palestine.”
As musicians, Hatari’s members are tragically uninteresting, binding the worst of metal and EDM in a BDSM aesthetic that is more amusing than arousing, like the musical act in a bad Eastern European strip club. As political activists, however, Hatari is legitimately fascinating: If you’d like to understand the emotional valence of the contemporary European left, look no further than these bare-chested boppers.
Exit quote: “So here’s Iceland, a European nation troubled by a collaborationist Nazi past, eager to reinvent itself as a champion of all that is enlightened and good. To distance itself from one murderous made-up ideology, which it used to its own benefit, it aligns itself with another group of murderous haters. Against this kind of historical backdrop, the band’s S&M drag and nihilistic poses make perfect sense.”
The Weimar-esque photo atop the article is unintentionally laugh aloud funny; read the whole thing, for a look at how the children of Europe’s elite become Radical Chic: The Next Generation.
HEZBOLLAH ISN’T JUST IN BEIRUT. IT’S IN NEW YORK, TOO: The trial of a senior operative reveals the extent of the terrorist organization’s reach in the United States and Canada.
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