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January 12, 2016

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THESE PEOPLE DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT MUCH: 4 Problems With Media Confusion Over Ted Cruz’s Quoting Of Scripture. “So if Ted Cruz is talking about the ‘body of Christ’ rising up, he certainly isn’t talking about Jesus rising from the dead. And Jesus having already risen from the dead is astonishing, yes, but it is not a teaching that Ted Cruz introduced to society. Ignorance of it 2,000 years later is indefensible. . . . When Christians refer to being members of the body of Christ, we’re saying that we all have different spiritual gifts, but we work together as one. We are one with Christ, but also one with each other. Some of us might be preachers, some of us might be Sunday School teachers, some of us might only be able to show up every few weeks and sit silently in a pew, but we’re all doing our part as members in the body. It’s a metaphor. And, just to be extra diligent here given the state of education in this country, I’ll add that a metaphor is a figure of speech that identifies something as being the same as some unrelated thing for rhetorical effect, thus highlighting the similarities between the two.”

WHY IS NARENDRA MODI SIDING WITH PIRATES? British sailors given India jail time for weapons charges on anti-piracy mission.

THE REST DIDN’T PAY: U.N. says some of its peacekeepers were paying 13-year-olds for sex. “They are preying on the people they’ve come to protect.”

A metaphor for our global ruling class.

BETTER IDEA: HAVE COLLEGES STAY OUT OF STUDENTS’ SEX LIVES. Campus Sex … With a Syllabus. Anything they teach is likely to be pernicious and bigoted anyway.

CUE THE HILLARY ATTACKS: Quinnipiac poll: Sanders surges to retake lead in Iowa.

MARK RIPPETOE ANSWERS A QUESTION FROM MILO YIANNOPOULOS: Is there a connection between low testosterone and victimhood culture?

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Powerball Meme Mathematical Illiteracy Illustrates Bernie Sanders’ Appeal; Politics suffer from a lack of numeracy among the public, and politicians.

GOOD QUESTION: WaPo: Jackie’s rape story was false. So why hasn’t the media named her by now?

News organizations have declined to reveal Jackie’s full identity since her now-discredited story appeared in Rolling Stone magazine in November 2014. Her single-name identity — just Jackie — is in keeping with a long-standing journalistic convention against identifying alleged victims of sexual crimes to protect the accuser’s privacy.

As a result, news accounts of rape or sex-related crimes almost never name an accuser without their explicit permission, making it the only class of crime involving adults in which this practice is observed.

But that standard arguably doesn’t apply in Jackie’s case. Her story has been shown repeatedly to be false, both through news reporting and an extensive police investigation. Rolling Stone has withdrawn the article, “A Rape on Campus,” and apologized to its readers for publishing an account that a Columbia Journalism School report called “a story of journalistic failure.”

Even so, Jackie has remained nearly anonymous. No mainstream media outlet has reported Jackie’s full name. Investigators for the Charlottesville police, who found no evidence to support Jackie’s story, haven’t revealed it, either. Her identity has also been redacted in documents by a court hearing one of the lawsuits against Rolling Stone.

While it’s debatable whether knowing Jackie’s full name would serve much public purpose, the collective reticence to identify her plays into an underlying discussion about the media’s responsibility in identifying accusers. In contrast, the accused are regularly identified once they are charged.

It’s almost like there’s a war on men.

SAD THAT THIS COUNTS AS A “CONTROVERSIAL” STANCE: Bernie Sanders: Law Enforcement Should Handle Campus Rape.

GARY TAUBES, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Man drops 75% of his body fat in just 12 weeks by swapping cereal for steak. Though that wasn’t the only change he made.

JAMES BOVARD: First Lady’s box should be empty at State of the Union speech: Saving seats for the dead would require a lot more room for victims of Obama’s policies.

While trumpeting the private death toll from guns, Obama on Tuesday night will likely ignore the 986 people killed by police in the United States last year according to The Washington Post’s database. Many police departments are aggressive — if not reckless — in part because the Justice Department always provides cover for them at the Supreme Court. Obama’s “Justice Department has supported police officers every time an excessive-force case has made its way” to a Supreme Court hearing, The New York Times noted last year. Attorney General Loretta Lynch recently said that federally-funded police agencies should not even be required to report the number of civilians they kill.

To add a Euro flair to the evening, Obama could drape tri-color flags on a few empty seats to commemorate the 30 French medical staff, patients, and others slain last Oct. 3 when an American AC-130 gunship blasted their well-known hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The U.S. military revised its story several times but admitted in November that the carnage was the result of “avoidable … human error.” Regrettably, that bureaucratic phrase lacks the power to resurrect victims.

No plans have been announced to designate a seat for Brian Terry, the U.S. Border Patrol agent killed in 2010. Guns found at the scene of Terry’s killing were linked to the Fast and Furious gunwalking operation masterminded by the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agency. At least 150 Mexicans were also killed by guns illegally sent south of the border with ATF approval. The House of Representatives voted to hold then-attorney general Eric Holder in contempt for refusing to disclose Fast and Furious details, but Obama is not expected to dwell on this topic in his State of the Union address. . . .

Four seats could be left vacant for the Americans killed in the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya — U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith, and CIA contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. But any such recognition would rankle the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, who has worked tirelessly to sweep those corpses under the rug. It would also be appropriate to include a hat tip to the hundreds, likely thousands, of Libyans who have been killed in the civil war unleashed after the Obama administration bombed Libya to topple its ruler, Moammar Gadhafi.

Perhaps the GOP should invite a member of the Nobel Peace Prize committee as their guest. . . .

DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: The Arabic gang-rape ‘Taharrush’ phenomenon which sees women surrounded by groups of men in crowds and sexually assaulted… and has now spread to Europe.

THINKING ABOUT FLYING SOMEWHERE SOON? Might want to think about this – Improving technology is almost always a blessing but there are occasional exceptions in unintended or unexpected consequences. Take those automatic pilots on commercial airliners. A new report from the Department of Transportation Inspector General says pilots’ manual skills are declining as computers increasingly take over the bulk of flight direction.

“While airlines have long used automation safely to improve efficiency and reduce pilot workload, several recent accidents, including the July 2013 crash of Asiana Airlines flight 214, have shown that pilots who typically fly with automation can make errors when confronted with an unexpected event or transitioning to manual flying,” the IG said, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Ethan Barton. So the question is, what are the airlines and FAA doing about this development? Not much, the IG says.

A BIG WELCOME TO STEPHEN GREEN, who will be popping over here with the occasional post. He’ll still be putting the longer stuff over at VodkaPundit, but the more the merrier over here!

MARC RANDAZZA: Twitter Takes a Side in the Culture Wars – Lies About It. “If I ran Twitter, I wouldn’t be very proud of it. And, its value is rapidly plummeting, both as a website worth visiting, and in financial terms. . . . For all Twitter’s lip service to freedom of expression and prevention of abuse, Twitter believes in neither.”

IN THE MAIL: The New Totalitarian Temptation: Global Governance and the Crisis of Democracy in Europe.

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EASTERN EUROPE TO GERMANY: We Told You So.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 978.

MEGAN MCARDLE: You Can’t Be Neutral in a Public-Sector Union.

When you’re negotiating with governments, there’s never a bright line where politics ends and negotiation begins. That’s why unions, and other folks who sell goods and services to governments, spend so much money on lobbying.

Large public-sector unions, like for police and sanitation workers, wield even more influence: Every time they sit down for negotiations, they bring the threat that their large and politically active membership will vote the bosses out of office if the talks go poorly. Public-sector workers are often legally forbidden the classic tools of labor organization, such as the walkout or the “work to rule” slowdown. But this Election Day cudgel is much bigger.

Often, of course, public workers’ unions augment this with political contributions and aggressive lobbying efforts, on topics that may go well beyond wages and benefits, and into political causes that help them build coalitions with other left-wing groups.

This broad political activity is part of why public-sector unions are doing so much better than their private-sector counterparts. But it also means that “closed shop” labor arrangements effectively force people into a package deal: Want to be a teacher or a cop? Then you have to join a union and make political statements that you may not agree with.

I agree with FDR: Public-sector unions are pernicious and should be banned.

FLASHBACK: The urgent case for stopping the flow of illegal migrants across the Mediterranean. A lot of Euros wish they’d done that now, but virtue-signalling was too important then.