Archive for 2016
November 2, 2016
WE’LL KNOW SOON ENOUGH: UK, Irish Punters Swinging Big to Trump.
SCIENTIFICALLY, what’s the worst way to die?
WAR ON MEN: Universities work to purge male students of their ‘toxic’ masculinity.
This sort of assault on an entire gender seems like it would create a hostile environment based on sex, in violation of Title IX.
ANALYSIS: FALSE. Vogue says cleavage is ‘over’
DRIVING THE Audi A5 Sportback.
AN ARREST IN GERMANY: The Express reports German police arrested a Syrian immigrant who they believe fought for the Islamic State while living in Syria and was “undertaking surveillance on potential targets in Berlin” on behalf of the Islamic State. He had also recruited a fighter for ISIS. “Germany’s top prosecutor said this is the first prosecution brought against an immigrant suspected of planning an attack.”
According to the indictment:
“He scouted out potential attack targets during stays in Berlin and he helped send at least one person as a fighter to Syria. In addition, he made himself available as a contact person for potential attackers in Germany and signaled his fundamental readiness to commit an attack in Germany.”
ANDREW FERGUSON: The New York Times Invents a Narrative on Comey:
We mastodons who still receive our daily dose of New York Times when the dead-tree version lands on our doorsteps with a dull thud got a special treat Tuesday, a textbook case of the way “the newspaper of record” goes about its business these days. The front page headline read: “Comey Role Recalls Hoover’s F.B.I., Fairly or Not.”
* * * * * * *
To fully understand the headline, it helps to know that the Times has a relationship with its readers that is best described as “Pavlovian.” After years of careful training, the newspaper has only to ring a bell to raise the appropriate response from its audience: joy, terror, laughter, sorrow, approval, revulsion, running the gamut from lol to smdh.
Read the whole thing.
Related: New York Times reports 95.7 percent fall in quarterly profit.
AN OBAMA ADMINISTRATION COVER-UP OF HILLARY’S CRIMES?: The hacked Podesta emails indicate the State Dept “coordinated” its official statements about her email server with Hillary’s campaign. State is denying this, but the Wikileaks emails say otherwise. An Obama Administration cover-up? The RNC says so. I think Hillary’s obstruction of justice operation has been evident for at least a year. The House Select Committee on Benghazi report (the preliminary version that was released in late June) supports my assertion. Here’s Section IV: Compliance With Congressional Investigations.
ROGER KIMBALL ON the latest example of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “Suffolk University’s interim president said Tuesday that the college will hold mandatory microagression training for all faculty in response to an outcry last week after a Latina student wrote a viral blog post saying she was the victim of a professor’s racial bias.”
And, inevitably: “Kelly also listed a number of new administrators that have been hired in recent months to address matters of diversity and inclusion and said the school two weeks ago launched an internal climate survey to assess areas that need improvement.” New administrators. That should fix everything!
HILLARY’S HUBRIS, WEINER’S PORN AND COMEY’S CONSCIENCE: My latest NY Observer essay. (bumped)
IT’S THE FINAL COUNTDOWN: Over at VodkaPundit, (probably) the last 2016 edition of Wargaming the Electoral College.
FRAGILE QUANTUM STATES IN WARM, WET HUMAN BRAINS: It’s Quanta Magazine picking up on speculation that human brains employ “quantum processing.” The idea is very controversial — but the article is informative.
IN THE FUTURE, EVERYONE WILL BE ADOLF HITLER FOR 15 MINUTES – AND THE FUTURE IS NOW: Everyone Who Disagrees with the Southern Poverty Law Center Is Hitler:
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which made its reputation tracking and cataloguing violent extremist groups, has set its sights on a new group of people who are neither violent nor extreme but who are in fact precisely the opposite of that: critics of the violence and extremism too often associated with Islam.
The new SPLC blacklist includes: Daniel Pipes, holder of a Ph.D. in Islamic history from Harvard, a man who reads both modern and classical Arabic, who studied in Egypt, and who has taught at Harvard and the University of Chicago; Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a celebrated author, a former member of the Dutch parliament and crusader against female genital mutilation; Maajid Nawaz, a British Muslim reformist who was held as a political prisoner in Egypt; former Defense Department official Frank Gaffney; Radical Son author David Horowitz; attorney and free-speech advocate Robert Muise of the American Freedom Law Center; provocatrix Pamela Geller; former PLO member and Muslim reformist Walid Shoebat, among others.
Awfully tweedy for a bunch of would-be terrorists.
As Lee Smith of Tablet writes, this “New Blacklist From the Southern Poverty Law Center Marks the Demise of a Once-Vital Organization:”
Nawaz takes the SPLC blacklist seriously, he told me, because he believes that it has put his life in danger. “They’ve put a target on my head,” he said. “This is what putting people on lists does. When Theo Van Gogh was killed in the Netherlands, a list was stuck to his body that included Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s name. It was a hit list. When Bangladeshi reformers were hacked to death by jihadist terrorists, they were working off lists. Only fascists produce lists.”
It’s not easy to understand how the SPLC got here. The organization started in 1971 as a civil-rights law firm designed to combat white-supremacist groups. In 1981 it won a civil suit against the Klan for $7 million that bankrupted the United Klans of America. In 1991, it used the same tactics to win a $12 million judgment against the White Aryan Resistance. It won a $6.5 million case against the Aryan Nations in 2001. Co-founder Morris Dees’ career was dramatized in a TV movie, Line of Fire.
For SPLC’s efforts against violent white supremacists, its members were frequently targeted for reprisal. Yet now, the SPLC is putting bounties on the heads of Muslims like Maajid Nawaz, who are opposed to Muslim extremism. Where the SPLC was once able to win legal battles through careful, often dangerous research that could stand up in court, the organization now identifies the Center for Security Policy, a hawkish right-wing think tank, as a hate group, right alongside the Ku Klux Klan. Where the organization once pushed for freedom for all regardless of race or creed, now it aims to silence those whose opinions it finds objectionable. In doing so, it makes it hard for any impartial observer to place much confidence in future claims about groups and individuals that may actually be dangerous.
In 2003, when Bush Derangement Syndrome caused Amnesty International to nuke its once more-or-less objective reputation, the late Steven Den Beste dubbed it a case of “pandering to the membership,” which likely also sums up what caused the SPLC to implode:
It’s not going too far to say that many of Amnesty International’s members have approximately as strongly negative of feelings now about America and George Bush as the ACLU’s members had about the Nazis when the ACLU defended them in Skokie.
The ACLU made the principled decision and weathered the downturn in contributions. When condemnation of Iraq didn’t make AI look as if it was aligning with America, Amnesty International was willing to try to shine a spotlight on the abuses there. But now AI has suddenly gone silent. The abuses against the citizens of Iraq have not stopped; indeed they’ve gotten worse. In addition to ongoing violent repression of Iraq’s civilian population, various Iraqi military and para-military units have been directly violating the Geneva Convention by, for instance, abusing the white flag of truce, and by using protected humanitarian facilities to hold military equipment, and by using “human shields” in combat, and by directly firing at refugees, and in numerous other ways.
And what we’re seeing is that AI seems unwilling to make more than oblique mention of these things, while at the same time explicitly condemning the US for what are at best minor transgressions by comparison. Why is it more important to strongly focus attention on “censorship” while ignoring mass slaughter of refugees?
It’s because a large percentage of AI’s membership hates America and would cease making contributions if AI actually took a principled stand and told the truth. So Amnesty International, and other groups like it, are facing the same decision that the ACLU did in Skokie. But unlike the ACLU, they’re demonstrating moral cowardice, and letting mercenary issues overrule principle.
Since telling the truth would cost them, they aren’t doing so. Instead, they’re pandering. Since staying true to their stated principles would cost them, they’ve discarded their principles.
The fact that in the past AI has written so often about Iraqi abuses makes their current silence all the more damning.
Similarly, as the SPLC is about to discover, reputations for impartiality are very difficult to recover once an institution goes full-on SJW.
(Via Maggie’s Farm.)
MORE ON THE DEPT OF JUSTICE MOLE HUNT: Did DOJ’s Peter Kadzik work a quid pro quo with Podesta? It’s a possibility. (See Ed’s prior link.)
A Justice Department spokesman, though, downplayed the significance of Kadzik’s 2015 email, saying it was “about public information” and sent “in his personal capacity, not during work hours.” “He wasn’t communicating via official channels because it wasn’t official business,” Kevin Lewis told FoxNews.com. “He wasn’t emailing as ‘Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik.’”Lewis, who would not characterize the substance of the email, said officials in the department do not typically provide campaign advice. “It is not department practice to provide any strategic guidance to any campaign,” said Lewis, who did not answer when asked if Kadzik’s behavior was acceptable to the Justice Department.
JACUZZI OF DEATH: Great title for a fascinating article about an undersea brine pool.
HONESTLY, I CAN NAME MORE THAN FIVE: The 5 Viruses You Never Want To Get.
DINOSAUR: New York Times reports 95.7 percent fall in quarterly profit.
That’s a lot.
QUESTIONS ASKED: Did WikiLeaks just uncover Clinton’s mole within the DOJ? Who is Peter Kadzik and why is no one reporting on this?