DESPITE CONSIDERABLE OPPOSITION FROM “THE PARTY OF SCIENCE:” Genetically Engineered Salmon Approved for Consumption. “The fish are supposed to be raised inland in contained tanks to lessen the chances that they will escape into the wild. AquaBounty and its supporters say this will also be less stressful on the environment than using pens in the ocean. And it could eventually allow the fish to be raised in the United States, rather than being imported, as most farmed Atlantic salmon is.”
Archive for 2015
November 21, 2015
WELL, THEY PRETTY MUCH HAVE TO, DON’T THEY? White House downplays Dem defections on Syrian refugees bill.
SO THE WHOLE FLAP WAS JUST MORE MEDIA BS? Byron York: How the crazy Trump Muslim database story got started. “I asked Walker and Yahoo to provide a transcript or audio of the interview, and late Friday afternoon they posted a three-minute-19-second excerpt. Probably the best way to describe Trump’s reaction when Walker raised the database question is to say Trump didn’t address it at all. Trump certainly did not say, or even suggest, that he wouldn’t rule out a Muslim database.” Transcript at the link.
York concludes: “In the end, the responsibility is always the candidate’s to be on guard for attempts, by journalists or rival campaign operatives, to entice him into saying damaging things. Sometimes those are attempts to create a story out of nothing. The Muslim database affair seems a particularly audacious example of that.” Trump needs to watch out. Like McCain, he had friendly relations with the press until he looked like a Republican who might be President. Once you fall into that category, expect this kind of treatment.
YOU WILL NEVER FIND A MORE PROGRESSIVE HIVE OF SCUM, VILLAINY AND SEXISM: Hillary’s Hollywood Posse Says Take Off Your Shirt, Starlet (But Step Away From the Director’s Chair):
Liberal Hollywood men effectively form a secret society that blackballs anyone with more natural estrogen than Caitlyn Jenner from becoming director of a major motion picture.
We learn this from Liberal female columnist Maureen Dowd, writing in the liberal New York Times Magazine. She’s alarmed that less than 2 percent of the top 100 movies boast a female director.
With this and the racism running rampant on both college campuses, and in Hollywood (just ask Spike Lee or the leftwing movie critic in your local paper), why are leftwing enclaves such hotbeds of racism and sexism?
(But given that, as President Obama likes to say, “there’s no greater threat to our planet than climate change,” shouldn’t Democrats be working hard to permanently shutter such a non-essential highly energy-dependent industry that’s built on tax breaks for the wealthy?)
TESTING EINSTEIN’S THEORIES with satellites stuck in eccentric orbits.
CLEAR OUT CLUTTER, and trade in your used stuff at Amazon.
CATHY YOUNG: The dangers of going too far to curb online harassment.
Too often, the progressive activists who dominate initiatives against cyberabuse — and advise major companies — openly advocate favoritism based on identity politics. One model code of conduct for digital communities that has served as a basis for companies such as Google, Yahoo and Facebook takes a tough anti-harassment stance but explicitly “prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort” and rejects complaints about “reverse racism,” “reverse sexism” or being attacked for “oppressive behavior or assumptions.”
Indeed, Internet “social justice” activism with its culture of “call-outs” and pile-ons can itself be a harassment machine. Recently, a 19-year-old comic artist reportedly attempted suicide due to bullying by bloggers who relentlessly attacked her for perceived “fatphobia,” racial stereotyping and other sins. In May, film director Joss Whedon left Twitter after a nasty backlash against supposed anti-feminism in “Avengers: Age of Ultron.” (While Whedon denied he was driven off, he certainly faced a barrage of ugliness.)
Yet most discussions of Internet harassment omit such toxic behavior and even more egregious abuse with a “progressive” face. Two years ago, there was much media sympathy for a so-called hacktivist facing legal trouble for cyberattacks targeting residents of Steubenville, Ohio, to bring attention to the rape of a teenage girl. Never mind that the online vigilantism hurt many innocent people who had their records exposed and were threatened or smeared.
Like most lefty campaigns, it’s all about exacerbating power differentials while pretending to address them.
WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? MIZZOU FACING IMAGE CRISIS AFTER RACIAL ISSUES, UPHEAVAL. I think the Missouri state legislature is going to have to exercise a lot more control over the university. It’s obvious that it has management problems.
ROBERT TRACINSKI: Barack Obama: Worst. President. Ever.
I still remember a lot of people telling me in 2006 that George W. Bush was the “worst president ever.”
They had no idea what they were talking about. This is what the “worst president ever” looks like. In his response to the attacks in Paris, Barack Obama has shown us a leader who is not just inadequate to his core responsibilities, but contemptuous of them.
Yeah, pretty much.
THIS EXPLAINS A LOT: US Pilots Confirm: Obama Admin Blocks 75 Percent of Islamic State Strikes.
Strikes against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS or ISIL) targets are often blocked due to an Obama administration policy to prevent civilian deaths and collateral damage, according to Rep. Ed Royce (R., Calif.), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The policy is being blamed for allowing Islamic State militants to gain strength across Iraq and continue waging terrorist strikes throughout the region and beyond, according to Royce and former military leaders who spoke Wednesday about flaws in the U.S. campaign to combat the Islamic State.
“You went 12 full months while ISIS was on the march without the U.S. using that air power and now as the pilots come back to talk to us they say three-quarters of our ordnance we can’t drop, we can’t get clearance even when we have a clear target in front of us,” Royce said. “I don’t understand this strategy at all because this is what has allowed ISIS the advantage and ability to recruit.”
When asked to address Royce’s statement, a Pentagon official defended the Obama administration’s policy and said that the military is furiously working to prevent civilian casualties.
“The bottom line is that we will not stoop to the level of our enemy and put civilians more in harm’s way than absolutely necessary,” the official told the Washington Free Beacon, explaining that the military often conducts flights “and don’t strike anything.”
I’m not surprised. The Obama Administration wages war with the zeal of a sleepy llama.
RELATED: New ISIS video says it will lead Obama and other US leaders “like slaves, like dogs.”
IN THE MAIL: From Peggy Noonan, The Time of Our Lives: Collected Writings.
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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 926.
DAVID BROOKS ON OBAMA, COMPASSION, AND THE REFUGEE CRISIS:
For Democrats, I think there’s a sense of responsibility here. You know, President Obama waxed self-righteous about the Republican bill and the Republican behavior, but he’s made a series of cold and, to me, amoral decisions over the past five years to allow this genocide. And maybe they were the right decisions, but they were not moral decisions. They were Machiavelli and Realpolitik decisions not to get involved.
That’s why he’s trying so hard to paint the Republicans as meanies.
BYRON YORK: Obamacare death spiral a gift to 2016 GOP candidates.
There have been many articles in the last year with some variation of the headline “GOP Surrenders on Obamacare.” The stories mostly concern a tendency among some Republican policy elites to adopt the Washington conventional wisdom that Obamacare cannot be repealed because it has already become deeply entrenched in American life.
Those Republicans might want to reconsider. A series of developments in recent days suggests the Affordable Care Act is in perilous condition and could become even more troubled in months to come. . . .
It goes without saying that all the stuff President Obama said while selling Obamacare — that it would save the average family $2,500, that people who liked their coverage could keep it, etc. — have long ago gone up in smoke.
This is a potent political issue. Republican base voters have never gone along with the party’s Beltway elites in making their peace with Obamacare. Any candidate who pledges on the stump to repeal every word of the Affordable Care Act wins a raucous round of applause. And in light of recent news, look for them to do it more and more.
Wrap it with the — transparently true — overarching theme that our political class in Washington is made up of fools, crooks, and liars and you’ve got a winning narrative!
THE STAR WARS ECONOMY IS BIGGER THAN YOU THINK: Chris Taylor, author of How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise is featured in a new interview at Reason TV:
Taylor says, up until the release of Star Wars: A New Hope, merchandising never worked out for the movies. But, because of the long-term popularity of the film, the merchandising hit the shelves at the right time.
“Because it stuck around for so long, it actually meant that you could actually get the merchandising to consumers while the movie was still in the theaters, which was huge, and it had not been done before,” says Taylor. “There was an incredible repeat-ability to it and there was a cult.”
That cult of fans bought action figures from Kenner, iron-on t-shirts from Factors Inc. and event jewelry in the shape of X-wing fighters from the Weingeroff jewelry firm. Further, they began to recreate the world of Star Wars on their own, making their own memorabilia from scratch.
* * * * * * *
Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012 for $4.05 billion in 2012 and adopted the allegiance to fans in the process.
While Star Wars radically changed how films are merchandised and distributed, and had a landmark impact on movie and TV special effects, there’s no small drawback to the revolution that Star Wars’ mega-success brought to Hollywood.
As Jonathan Last wrote a decade ago in his Weekly Standard review of Edward Jay Epstein’s book Big Picture, Hollywood now functions “as a giant clearinghouse for intellectual property,” as a successful movie franchise translates into not just toys, t-shirts and fast-food branded with movie logos, but soundtracks, books, DVDs, spin-off TV series, etc.
Which is why, as James McCormick wrote in his 2006 review of Big Picture, Hollywood films essentially now come in two flavors only: the Disney / Marvel / Lucasfilm / Pixar / James Bond / Star Trek-type franchise designed for endless merchandising, and art-house flicks. In the Bush era, these latter films included anti-War on Terror stinkers such as Lions for Lambs, In the Valley of Elah, and Redacted. Today, the theme du jour seems to be revisionist history in the form of the pro-Weather Underground The Company You Keep, the pro-Dan Rather “Truth,” and the pro-Communist Trumbo. These much more economically budgeted films are guaranteed to lose money at the box office, but make pro-Obama studio executives and lefty celebrities with pull (note how many of the above bombs star Robert Redford) feel good about themselves:
The movies made for kids and adolescents are, by design, denatured and created in the form of over-simplified hero tales. And the “art house” loss-leaders created to placate Hollywood’s egomaniacs are about individuals casting off the cultural, moral, and sexual constraints of their societies to find personal liberation (sound familiar?). Since the merchandising blockbusters must satisfy the international market, the “hero tales” transmit little more about American culture than US teens are good with guns. And the “art-house” films are mostly about outdoing the rest of the world in the denigration of Anglosphere domestic culture and sanctifying appropriate victims.
Despite the awful memories of the Star Wars prequels, I’m sure I’ll go see Episode Seven. And I would love to come out of the theater with that same fist-pumping energy that the original Star Wars delivered and/or the feeling of awe from that haunting last scene in the Empire Strikes Back.
But I’d like to think George Lucas himself is savoring the irony that his modestly-budgeted pro-Vietcong 1977 movie helped to make him a billionaire. If only its success had inspired him to make better movies in the process.
LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Fighting Terrorism With Tourniquets.
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LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Brussels on Lockdown Because of Serious Evidence of Impending Terror Attack.
“IDEOLOGY AS COMFY SLIPPERS.” In his latest G-File, Jonah Goldberg writes, “After 9/11, big swaths of the Left immediately wanted to talk about censorship and the threat to Americans’ First Amendment rights…It is a natural human tendency to want to just go and play with your toys when the world is crashing down around you. The campus Huns pillaging higher education these days only want to talk about “white privilege” — unimpeded by debate, facts, reality, or anything smacking of an opposing point of view — because it is psychologically comfortable and politically empowering. Contemplating that your problems don’t have all that much to do with systemic bigotry is discomfiting. So they want safe spaces to play with their conceptual Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys:”
And that is why, as I argue in my column today, Barack Obama is so eager to respond to the Paris attacks with a rhetorical fusillade against Republican bigotry. It is a ploy as brilliant as it is disgustingly cynical. Obama is a co-author of this refugee crisis. As Walter Russell Mead writes, “No one, other than the Butcher Assad and the unspeakable al-Baghdadi, is as responsible for the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria as is President Obama.” Somewhere deep inside Obama’s supposedly Niebuhrian conscience even he must suspect there is some truth to this. And even if his denial is total, he must understand that a great many historians will side with Mead in this appraisal.
Rather than face this unthinkable truth, Obama seeks to change the story line so that he is the noble and besieged martyr fighting the forces of reaction at home, rather than the hapless and bumbling nutty professor who let the world go to Hell on his watch. “Sanctimony over refugees is Obama’s way of restoring his own moral superiority over people who’ve been complaining for years, entirely correctly, that his Syria policy is FUBAR and has contributed to the disaster,” as Allahpundit writes.
Read the whole thing.
The notion of ideology as a safe space during a time of both real and ideological crisis also helps to explain how the left’s waging “the moral equivalent of war” on vaporous “climate change” has run on such a long parallel track to Islamic terrorism since shortly after 9/11. And why Obama has said that “there’s no greater threat to our planet than climate change” so many times while simultaneously engaging in what Jonah correctly dubs his “phony war on the Islamic State [that] was always more about seeming to do something while running out the clock until his successor inherits his mess.”
POLITICAL SCIENCE: More problems with a famous campus sexual assault study.
In 2002, Michael Finkel was fired from the New York Times after the newspaper discovered that his feature story was not about a single victim of the African slave trade, but actually a fake character made up of several men he had interviewed in the region.
It appears that same tactic has been used by researcher David Lisak, whose theory about serial rapists on college campuses has heavily influenced campus sexual assault policies and who was featured prominently in the film, “The Hunting Ground.”
Lisak gives a presentation about sexual assault that includes a video “reenactment of an interview conducted by Dr. David Lisak … as part of a study of men who had raped but were never reported or prosecuted for their crimes.” The video shows Lisak interviewing “Frank,” an actor purported to be reading a transcript from an interview Lisak actually conducted as part of his research.
“Rather, he is an aggregation of several interviews from Lisak’s dissertation research, which raises the level of concern by an order of magnitude,” wrote Reason’s Linda LeFauve. “Material cut-and-pasted is material at risk of serving an agenda. Had Lisak described the video as intentionally designed to make a point, it might — might — even be an understandable agenda were it not for the two problems already noted: It is based on material decades out of date, and it is edited to make a point about serial predators not backed by research.”
It’s as if these people start out with a narrative, then just make stuff up to support it or something.
NOW THIS COUNTS AS A “SAFE SPACE” VIOLATION: Utah Teacher’s 9th Grade Class Assignment: Draw Propaganda Poster for ISIS.
Oh, the “fun” the kids must have had while Googling for source material. Additionally, “The possibility of having to search for ISIS recruiting material on the web at a time when officials are looking to detect potential threats was alarming,” one parent told ABC News.
JOEL KOTKIN ON DEMOGRAPHICS: Too Many Places Will Have Too Few People.