#FEELTHEBERN: How bad is it in Venezuela? Soldiers are stealing goats.
Archive for 2016
May 4, 2016
WHY ARE LEFTIST INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF RACISM AND SEXISM? Irony alert: AP’s race and ethnicity editor sues for racial discrimination.
Longtime Associated Press journalist Sonya Ross has sued the AP for race, sex and age discrimination and retaliation, alleging that she has worked under a “hostile and abusive” environment in the news service’s Washington bureau.
According to the suit, Ross was the first African American woman to permanently cover the president for AP, but her career stalled several years later under one supervisor, identified in the suit as Employee A, and others at the organization.
Ross claims that the AP created “a climate of hostility towards African American employees” and Employee A marginalized Ross.
No wonder lefties see the world this way. Their world is this way.
IT BEGINS: Get Ready for the Biggest Media Assault You’ve Ever Seen—Aimed Squarely at Trump.
UPDATE: Transcript and audio of Rush Limbaugh reading a pull-quote from Paula Bolyard’s PJM article on the air today.
(Bumped.)
I DON’T KNOW, I THINK THIS DEMONSTRATES A LACK OF COMMITMENT: The 19-year-old said she would continue to fight for equal rights, “but I don’t see the need to show my breasts all the time”.
MILO YIANNOPOULOS: Meme Magic: Donald Trump Is The Internet’s Revenge On Lazy Elites.
Choose the form of your destructor.
UPDATE: From the comments: “Trump was the Mule to Nate Silver’s Foundation.”
SCIENCE: Testosterone Makes You More Honest. Hmm. I suspect that a fair number of our ruling-class guys are supplementing with testosterone, but I’m not seeing any increase in honesty. On the other hand, I suppose you have to set that against a background of generally falling testosterone levels.
WELL GOSH, THAT WOULD BE AWFUL: If Trump destroys GOP, he may take DNC down with him.
HERPES: Australia’s Surprising Weapon Against Invasive Fish.
To rid their streams and rivers of invasive European carp crowding out native freshwater species, officials plan to begin introducing a strain of the herpes virus — Cyprinid herpesvirus 3 (CyHV-3), or “carp herpes” — into fish populations.
In a statement released May 1, Australian Department of Agriculture and Water Resources (DAWR) officials described their National Carp Control Plan, which will be developed over the next two and a half years at a cost of approximately AU$15 million (about US$11.2 million) and potentially deployed by 2018.
Research by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has already determined that the virus kills European carp quickly, and that it does not develop in native fish, in other introduced fish species or in other animals — including humans.
Good to know.
JESUS ON A DART BOARD AT RUTGERS: THE DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD OF FREE SPEECH: Conservatives demanding removal of the ‘artwork’ are using tactics of the professional offended class of the left.
Is that really such a bad thing? As Obama and Hillary’s mentor famously said, “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules..You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.”
DELIVER US FROM SCHLOCK: Reimagining Times Square, my City Journal proposal for liberating the Crossroads of the World from city bureaucrats, desnudas, costumed characters and rent-seeking vendors of schlock. Then we can liberate the rest of Broadway from cars and create the world’s greatest promenade. (Hear me out, car lovers. As the author of The Autonomist Manifesto, I share your affection for cars – everywhere except Manhattan.)
UNEXPECTEDLY: Study Finds Employers Are Hiring More Freelancers To Avoid Obamacare.
And building more robots to avoid minimum wage hikes. Who could have predicted such developments?!
WHY PEN CAPS have holes in them. “Turns out it’s not just us who love chewing on pen lids – a whole lot of people do it, and that can lead to lids getting accidentally swallowed and lodged in the wind pipe, with potentially fatal consequences. By simply adding a larger hole to the top of the lid, pen company BIC increased air flow and the chance that people would still be able to breathe even if that happens – a design feature that, quite literally, saves lives.”
21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: Death By GPS: Why do we follow digital maps into dodgy places?
READING DAVID BROOKS IN ALTOONA: At Commonweal, Matthew Sitman, who grew up just outside Altoona, Pennsylvania (100 miles east of Pittsburgh) writes:
Blair County, where I was raised and where my parents still live, overwhelmingly went for Trump in the recent Pennsylvania primary, giving him 61 percent of the vote. A few neighboring counties delivered even larger margins of victory.
And as it happens, I was traveling back to this part of Pennsylvania on Friday to visit my parents when I read David Brooks’s latest column, in which he confesses he was woefully unprepared to understand the rise of Trump. Or rather, he simply doesn’t know the kind of people Trump appeals to:
I was surprised by Trump’s success because I’ve slipped into a bad pattern, spending large chunks of my life in the bourgeois strata — in professional circles with people with similar status and demographics to my own. It takes an act of will to rip yourself out of that and go where you feel least comfortable. But this column is going to try to do that over the next months and years. We all have some responsibility to do one activity that leaps across the chasms of segmentation that afflict this country.
At first I thought Brooks deserved some credit for this, and maybe he does: there seems to be a measure of regret expressed in this passage—and shouldn’t he be admired for his intellectual curiosity, for wanting to learn about the “other”? Perhaps. But as I sat in my uncomfortable bus seat and we rumbled along on Interstate 80, the column grated on me more and more. By the time I reached home, it seemed to me not just a typical, mildly annoying Brooks column, but an emblem of why those searching for what to do about Trump—especially on the right—have proven so disastrously ineffective.
It’s rather disturbing that it took a vulgar, authoritarian demagogue being on the brink of the Republican nomination for Brooks to realize that he might have intellectual and political blindspots when it comes to working-class people and others straining under the post-recession economy. Could he really be serious? The column was written in the faux-innocent style Brooks has perfected, treating a banal observation as a breakthrough. It baffles me that someone paid to observe the American political and cultural scene didn’t realize before the last few months just how many Americans were struggling, or that the fallout from the 2008 recession might generate a populist-tinged backlash.
Gee, wait ‘til Sitman discovers Pauline Kael. Seriously though, there’s a reason why Dana Loesch’s new book is titled, Flyover Nation: You Can’t Run a Country You’ve Never Been To. I can’t wait to read its review in the Times; if indeed the Gray Lady deigns to write about it all.
UPDATE (From Glenn): How David Brooks Created Donald Trump.
AT AMAZON, Deals On Bras.
IT’S LOOKING BETTER AND BETTER TO ME EVERY TIME I WATCH THE NEWS: Elon Musk May Go to Mars, but Would You?
WAPO HEADLINE: “What Donald Trump wants to do to America.”
Think WaPo will phrase the headline the same way when Hillary secures her party’s nomination?
NOBODY COVERS ALL THE BASES LIKE ENGLAND’S LABOUR PARTY! Sadiq Khan engulfed in new race storm after branding moderate Muslims ‘Uncle Toms.’
As I wrote here on Sunday, “Reuters adds that Kahn will be “the first Muslim to head a major Western capital.” He’s pledged to be ‘a Muslim Mayor that stands up for Jewish rights,’ and I hope that works out well, but he’s got his job cut out for him; as Nick Cohen writes in the Guardian (of all places), ‘I saw the darkness of Labour’s antisemitism, but I never thought it would get this dark.’”
But the year is still young.
DISINVITED ON CAMPUS: The anti-free speech takeover is so complete that now the fear of stirring a protest can determine what ideas students will hear.
Manhattan Institute senior fellow Jason Riley was barred from Virginia Tech for doubleplusungoodthink:
The Obama presidency, high-profile police shootings, the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the national debate surrounding mass incarceration have led to more invitations from schools to offer my opinion on race relations. Many of the students I encounter tend to believe that white racism largely explains racial disparities in the U.S. I encourage them to consider other possible explanations given black history. Large parts of these speeches are devoted to what was happening in black America in the first half of the 20th century with respect to employment, schooling, crime and parenting and why so many positive black trends either slowed dramatically or reversed course beginning in the 1960s.
Students who disagree with my lectures don’t hesitate to speak out during the Q&A. The back-and-forth is spirited but civil, and I have never been shouted down or physically threatened.
Still, a disinvitation at some point may have been inevitable.
The stated reason for Riley’s disinvite? His presence might spark protests.
VIDEO: WHat’s the Right Angle on “meternity” leave? PJTV alums Bill Whittle, Scott Ott, and Steve Green discuss from their new home.
Full disclosure: I’m Green.
REPORT: KASICH SUSPENDING CAMPAIGN.
On Monday, Roger Simon asked “Who Will Be Trump’s VP?” Today, Ed Morrissey writes that Kasich could fit the bill quite well: “Well-versed in Washington politics? Check. Getting solutions through a legislature? Check, although sometimes to the dismay of conservatives. Kasich also holds the promise of winning Ohio, without which Republicans can kiss any hopes for the White House good-bye…We’ll see, but perhaps not soon. Team Trump might want to hold off on that media blitz until sometime in June, when they can use the pick to disrupt the ad attacks from Hillary Clinton’s PACs.”
