JOHN HINDERAKER: Sex Crimes Across Germany: The Coverup Unravels.
Archive for 2016
January 10, 2016
I THINK THIS ANALYSIS OF POWERBALL IS WRONG, because when you buy a ticket, you’re not really paying for a chance at winning — which is astronomically minuscule — but for a few minutes of fantasy about winning. So at 5 minutes of fantasy for $2.00, that’s 40 cents per minute. Contrast that with phone-sex rates and it’s a pretty good deal. . . .
IN THE MAIL: From Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.
Plus, today only at Amazon: 20% Or More Off Gaiam Yoga Basics.
And, also today only: Up to 20% Off select Jarrow Supplements.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 976.
POINTS AND FIGURES: The Solution to Income Inequality is to Empower People.
The policies that will solve for income inequality empower people. They don’t “take care” of people. People shouldn’t be warehoused and pushed aside or ignored from cradle to grave. People are assets. They aren’t liabilities to society. Successful policy isn’t about “handouts” or “hands up”. Policy should make it easier for individuals to control their own actions, and make their own way. There is dignity in work. There is dignity in the struggle. There is no dignity in government handouts.
That’s not to say government doesn’t have a role to play. It does. Laissez-Faire works to a point. But the problems are too deep, too ingrained for government to entirely walk away.
Our society is not based on a “zero sum game”. It’s based on opportunity (the pursuit of happiness). It’s not based on pure equality in every facet of life, but the equal opportunity to pursue life. America is a capitalistic free enterprise society. This core principle ensures that income inequality will always be present in our society. People will always be entering our society (and we want them) and transitioning through our society. Usually, they start at the bottom.
Instead of focusing on income inequality, we should be creating policy that focuses on income mobility and economic opportunity. Most of the policies on the books in America today make those two concepts harder to attain.
Ask yourself which policies provide better opportunities for graft and self-aggrandizement, and you’ll know which ones our political class will favor.
WHY DO YOU THINK? Why Amazon’s Data Centers Are Hidden in Spy Country.
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TWITTER PUNISHMENT OF BREITBART’S MILO YIANNOPOULOS SPARKS REVOLT:
Twitter’s notice to Yiannopoulos doesn’t specify the violation he is alleged to be guilty of, and while the gay conservative provocateur is, indeed, an outspoked presence on social media, it stands to reason that if he’d really done something to violate Twitter’s policies, he’d be suspended, not unverified. A person can’t say something that makes them less of who they are.
Franz Kafka never intended The Trial to be a how-to guide; if you’re unfamiliar with the portmanteau of “Kafkatrapping,” Eric Raymond’s 2010 post is an excellent introduction to a key facet of how the 21st century left operates.
THE LEFT’S OWN WAR ON SCIENCE, as charted by Toby Young in the UK Spectator:
How much longer can the liberal left survive in the face of growing scientific evidence that many of its core beliefs are false? I’m thinking in particular of the conviction that all human beings are born with the same capacities, particularly the capacity for good, and that all mankind’s sins can be laid at the door of the capitalist societies of the West. For the sake of brevity, let’s call this the myth of the noble savage. This romanticism underpins all progressive movements, from the socialism of Jeremy Corbyn to the environmentalism of Caroline Lucas, and nearly every scientist who challenges it provokes an irrational hostility, often accompanied by a trashing of their professional reputations. Indeed, the reaction of so-called free thinkers to purveyors of inconvenient truths is reminiscent of the reaction of fundamentalist Christians to scientists who challenged their core beliefs.
One such Charles Darwin figure is the American anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon. He has devoted his life to studying the Yanomamö, indigenous people of the Amazonian rain forest on the Brazilian-Venezuelan border, and his conclusions directly challenge the myth of the noble savage. ‘Real Indians sweat, they smell bad, they take hallucinogenic drugs, they belch after they eat, they covet and at times steal their neighbour’s wife, they fornicate, and they make war,’ Chagnon told a Brazilian journalist. His view of the Yanomamö people is summed up by the title he gave to his masterwork on the subject: The Fierce People.
Not surprisingly, Chagnon’s reputation proceeded to take a beating from the “scientific” left for writing such blatant doubleplusungood crimethink. Read the whole thing.
Related: “Dances With Myths — Half-truths about American Indians’ environmental ethic obscure the rational ways in which they have lived with and shaped the natural world.”
Original faux-Indian Iron Eyes Cody hardest hit.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Segregation is making a comeback — on college campuses.
Segregation was outlawed half a century ago, but some want to bring it back, at least on college campuses. And those seeking to bring segregation back are African-Americans — the very group hurt most by it in the early part of the 20th century.
Across the country last fall, college students began protesting alleged oppression and discrimination by white administrators and students. Most of the grievances centered around a lack of black professors or the names of certain buildings, but some protesters are asking for “safe spaces” where whites aren’t allowed.
A website called TheDemands.org details the 76 demand lists from protesters across the country. The College Fix has noted that many of the lists call for segregated sections of campus.
They told me if I voted for Mitt Romney, crazed racists would be pushing for a return to the pre-Brown era. And they were right!
WHY, IT’S LIKE THEY’RE DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES OR SOMETHING: CNN’s Cooper Lets Slip: White House Press Corps ‘Agrees’ With Obama.
TRUMP’S SECRET:
What is “authenticity” in contemporary politics? Is it a man who parlayed a routine Congressional career into a lucrative gig at Lehman Brothers presenting himself as the son of a mailman? Or is it a billionaire with a supermodel wife dropping the pretense that he’s no different from you stump-toothed losers in the rusting double-wides? Trump’s lack of pandering extends to America, too. He doesn’t do the this-is-the-greatest-country-in-the-history-of-countries shtick that Mitt did last time round. He isn’t promising, like Marco Rubio, a “second American century”. His pitch is that the American dream is dead – which, for many Americans, it is. In 1980, Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” was an aberration – a half-decade blip in three decades of post-war US prosperity that had enabled Americans with high school educations to lead middle-class lives in a three-bedroom house on a nice-sized lot in an agreeable neighborhood. In 2015, for many Americans, “malaise” is not a blip, but a permanent feature of life that has squeezed them out of the middle class. They’re not in the mood for bromides about second American centuries: They’d like what’s left of their own lifespan to be less worse.
Ouch.
WHAT IT TAKES TO WRITE MILITARY HISTORY:
Just as one shouldn’t have to be gay to write a history of gay Americans or a woman to do women’s history, he argued, “if you think personal experience is an essential criterion for doing history, then you invalidate any inquiry into a period before your own life experience.” He called for an end to such arguments, lest historians be reduced to memoirists.
Illustrating his point, O’Connell detailed a conversation he’d had with Harvard University Press leading up to the publication of Underdogs in 2012. Whereas he’d clearly indicated that he was a lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve inside the book, he said, the press wanted that biographical detail on the outside, ostensibly to sell more copies.
Well, these days the ability of men to write about feminism, and straights to write about gays, is sharply limited by identity politics.
TALK ABOUT BURYING THE LEDE: “Nuclear Deal Fuels Iran’s Hard-Liners — Since completion of the agreement, Tehran has stepped up arrests of political opponents ahead of next month’s national elections,” the Wall Street Journal notes, with a key historical detail buried over 20 paragraphs deep in the article:
But the ranks of reformists in Iran have been depleted. Many activists are angry at the Obama administration for failing to support them six years ago in a rebuff that hasn’t been previously reported.
Iranian opposition leaders secretly reached out to the White House in the summer of 2009 to gauge Mr. Obama’s support for their “green revolution,” which drew millions of people to protest the allegedly fraudulent re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The demonstrations caught the White House off guard, said current and former U.S. officials who worked on Iran in the Obama administration.
Obama, portrayed as omniscient by the MSM in 2008 and who believed his mere presence on the world scene would calm Islamic tensions? Say it ain’t so! But it gets worse:
U.S. officials said the White House also was getting conflicting messages from Green Movement leaders. Some wanted Mr. Obama to publicly warn Mr. Khamenei against using force. Others said such a declaration would give Iran’s supreme leader an excuse to paint the opposition as American lackeys.
Mr. Obama and his advisers decided to maintain silence in the early days of the 2009 uprising. The Central Intelligence Agency was ordered away from any covert work to support the Green Movement either inside Iran or overseas, said current and former U.S. officials involved in the discussions.
“If you were working on the nuclear deal, you were saying, ‘Don’t do too much,’ ” said Michael McFaul, who served as a senior National Security Council official at the White House before becoming ambassador to Russia in 2012.
After a week of demonstrations, Iran’s security forces went on to kill as many as 150 people and jail thousands of others over the following months, according to opposition and human rights groups. Mr. Khamenei accused the U.S. of instigating the uprising. Iran denied killing protesters.
Some of Mr. Obama’s closest advisers, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said in retrospect the U.S. should have backed the Green Movement. “If we could do it again, I would give different counsel,” said Dennis Ross, Mr. Obama’s top Mideast adviser during his first term. At the time, he said, he argued against embracing the protests.
Utterly pathetic. Obama has famously said, “The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.” And he’s not going to let anyone slander or attack the mullahs of Iran, either. As John Rivers tweets, “Remember in 2008 when America voted to become best friends with Iran? Me neither.”
ACTUALLY, IT’S A PRETTY OLD ONE: Don Surber: Gang rape is the new terrorism tool.
UNLESS IT’S A GENUINE THREAT, WHAT STUDENTS SAY ON TWITTER ISN’T THE SCHOOL’S BUSINESS: NJ High Schooler Called To The Principal’s Office “For Being Anti-Israel” On Twitter.
DON’T CRY FOR ME, SYRIA: “Let’s look at what Obama doesn’t cry about, and why,” Rand Simberg writes.
PEOPLE WHO LIE TO OTHERS IN ORDER TO EXTRACT MONEY UNDER FALSE PRETENSES SHOULD BE PUNISHED: This Lawsuit Could Destroy America’s Worst Law Schools.
SPEAKING OF STATUES OF SUPERSEDED AND PROBABLY REPULSIVE LIFE FORMS: These 3D Printed Trilobites Are Absolutely Stunning.
SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS GLORIFYING ART:Ridiculed ‘Mega Mao’ Statue Built In Village Devastated By His Famine Torn Down.
UNVERIFIED IS NOW A BADGE OF HONOR: Twitter Unverifies Writer Amid Speech Wars.
REALLY ONLY ONE THING OF NOTE HERE: Why didn’t anyone tell me the meaning of heartthrob had changed to “homely female who needs the entire push of the establishment to convince the ideologically blinded she’s attractive”? You know it’s your job to keep me up to date on slang! BUSTED: Lena Dunham Is a Liar (Just Like Hillary Clinton)
WOULD YOU BLAME THEM: If they went on strike?