Archive for 2016
April 18, 2016
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: ‘Super-gonorrhoea’ is spreading across Britain and will become untreatable, doctors fear.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Missouri Student Protestors Demanded Generators, a Fire Pit. “The protestors’ demands for comfort are in stark contrast with their public rhetoric to the media.”
The emails are just pathetic.
ALTERNATIVELY, MAYBE HE’S NOT ACTUALLY TRYING TO HELP THEM: Bernie Sanders’ fracking ban would kill jobs and drive up utility bills for the people he wants to help.
THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Corruption, Incompetence Scandal at DOJ’s Ferguson Unit Widens.
IN THE MAIL: From Elizabeth Warren & Amelia Warren Tyagi, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are (Still) Going Broke.
Plus today only at Amazon: Up to 60% off Cuisinart.
And, also today only: SINGER 3232 Simple Sewing Machine with Automatic Needle Threader, $95.99 (52% off).
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1075.
EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL. “How Regulators Mess With Bankers’ Minds, and Why That’s Good,” according to — but of course — the New York Times:
The regulators deliberately did not communicate the exact things the banks needed to do for their plans to pass muster. In this way, they kept them on their toes — and treating powerful banks this way may end up playing a surprisingly important role in keeping the financial regulation effective over time.
Franz Kafka, call your office! I’m old enough to remember when the American left considered Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Otter’s pretzel-logic boast to Flounder in Animal House that “you f***ed up — you trusted us!” to be warnings, not how-to guides for good governance.
https://youtu.be/5yeGMaT3PvI?t=1m39s
(Found via Mark Hemingway, who tweets, “Call me crazy, but stuff like this makes me think progressive types have bizarre ideas about financial regulation.”)
GIVE $300K TO CLINTON FOUNDATION, GET $13M BACK IN STATE DEPARTMENT GRANTS! Not a bad deal, at least for former Nobel Prize winner and long-time Clinton friend Muhammed Yunus. Government panels in Bangladesh and Norway accused him of extensive banking and charitable corruption but that didn’t disqualify Yunus from receiving millions in U.S. tax dollars via loans, grants and contracts from Hillary Clinton’s State Department, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock.
“The awards, totaling $13 million, were issued by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the development arm of the State Department, beginning when Clinton became secretary of state. Another $11 million in federal funds went to organizations allied with Yunus,” Pollock reports.
Yunus “is a high-profile fixture at most of the Clinton Foundation’s major gatherings. The foundation features him at 37 places on its website,” according to Pollock, who also reports that when he asked for details about the $13 million, “USAID Spokesman Raphael Cook said the agency didn’t have the ‘manpower’ to respond to questions about the transactions.” The agency has nearly 4,000 employees.
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YOUR TWITTER JUXTAPOSITION OF THE DAY:
TOLERANCE TURNED ON ITS HEAD: “Then the execrable Michael Moore said he would ask his film distributor not to burden North Carolina with his latest celluloid incoherence. ‘I have asked my distributor not to book my film in any theater in North Carolina due 2 their bigoted law against LGBTQ ppl — they have agreed,’ the C-list left picador tweeted. Who knew it would be so easy? Had the good burghers of North Carolina known they could avoid noise against the inoffensive night at a Greensboro concert site, and be free of some of the worst movies in the history of the world statewide, they would have made traditional bathroom etiquette a matter of law long ago.”
ROGER SIMON: The Syrian Refugees and Obama’s Plot Against America.
DICTATORSHIP OF THE DIMWITS: “An extraordinary short video making the rounds. A 5’9″ white guy goes onto the University of Washington campus and asks students to explain why he isn’t a 6’5″ Chinese female child in first grade. They can’t do it. They are so afraid of being judgmental, and offending against the sacred dogma of Self-Definition that they are unable to deny anything he claims about himself. (Not strictly true: one woman of the bunch politely doubts that he is 6’5″.) You have to watch this.”
As they say in Oceania, 2+2=5. Or as Michael Walsh, the author of The Devil’s Pleasure Palace and its history of how the Frankfurt School birthed the left’s war on culture (which birthed the left’s war on bathrooms) warns, “This is the dead end to which critical theory and its demon child, political correctness, have lead us. And it will get even worse; if you thought the drive to allow pervs into women’s locker rooms in the name of ‘equality’ was insane, wait til you see what’s coming next.”
ANOTHER INDICATION THAT THERE’S TOO MUCH MONEY IN POLITICS: Bernie Sanders Supporters Shower Hillary Clinton Motorcade With $1 Bills.
As the motorcade passed, Sanders supporters played the song “We’re In The Money.” After it was out of sight, they danced in the street and stomped on the dollar bills, according to CNN.
Sanders, who wants to reform the campaign finance system, has criticized Clinton for holding pricey fundraisers hosted by the Clooneys in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. Tickets for the Los Angeles event, which was co-hosted by Jeffrey and Marilyn Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw and Haim and Cheryl Saban, were priced at $33,400 per person. A couple wishing to co-chair the event in San Francisco had to pony up $353,000.
Asked whether he thought the pricing was appropriate in an interview on “Meet the Press,” Clooney gave a convoluted explanation.
“Yes. I think it’s an obscene amount of money. I think that, you know, we had some protesters last night when we pulled up in San Francisco and they’re right to protest. They’re absolutely right. It is an obscene amount of money. The Sanders campaign when they talk about it is absolutely right. It’s ridiculous that we should have this kind of money in politics. I agree completely.”
It’s practically a given that Clooney has never devoted any real thought as to why people are eager to give so much money to politicians.
SLEEPING DOGS ARE WAKING: “The tensions of 2016 are mounting. The center is not holding, as the foundations of our society—education, social cohesion, defense, and finance—erode. Trump and Sanders are mere symptoms of the collective fear about what is being lost. Far, far worse is on the horizon,” Victor Davis Hanson warns.
THE LEFT IS COMING FOR YOU NEXT: “The case against Exxon and CEI will not stop with Exxon and CEI,” Kevin D. Williamson warns. “We think in language, and we think in stories, a fact that is appreciated most keenly not by writers or literary critics but by censors…The American Left, which long ago abandoned its hereditary liberalism for totalitarianism, is very much interested in policing language.”
Read the whole thing.
MONICA LEWINSKY: ‘THE SHAME STICKS TO YOU LIKE TAR:’
A year ago she gave a TED talk about being the object of the first great internet shaming: “Overnight, I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one worldwide. Granted, it was before social media, but people could still comment online, email stories, and, of course, email cruel jokes. I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo, and, of course, ‘that woman’. It was easy to forget that ‘that woman’ was dimensional, had a soul, and was once unbroken.” Lewinsky’s talk was dazzling and now gets taught in schools alongside Nathaniel Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter. I can think of nobody I’d rather talk to about the minutiae of online bullying – who does it and why, the turmoil it can spark, and how to make things better.
As Bethany S. Mandel of the Federalist tweets in response for those who’ve forgotten the “fun” of the 1990s, “The Clintons destroy lives and ‘feminists’ were all to happy to help.” Quoting the above paragraph, Stephen Miller adds, “Lewinsky still seemingly oblivious to the media and party responsible for her bullying.”
ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Bernie Sanders’ illiberal supporters: Do they expect safe spaces everywhere? “We know that these repressives support Bernie. We need to know whether he supports them.”
Based on his ideological beliefs, yes. Next question?
ACTUALLY, I THINK THE AMOUNT OF MONEY IN THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY IS OBSCENE. George Clooney: Bernie Sanders is right about ‘obscene’ amount of money in politics.
Related: Gourmet menu on Bernie Sanders’ private campaign jet.
WHY ARE LEFTIE-RUN INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF . . . OH, HELL, YOU KNOW THE REST: UC-Berkeley Provost Resigns Amid Controversy Over His Handling Of Sexual Harassment Complaint Against Law School Dean.