ANNUAL RECOVERY SUMMER WATCH: Total U.S. weekly rail traffic down 17.3% for week ending June 4.
Archive for 2016
June 11, 2016
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SPACE JUNK: What Happens When It Crashes Back To Earth? I think the Moon’s orbit might decay before I get to the end of this unnecessarily click-harvesting slideshow. . . .
LATEST EDITION OF NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY TO BE DELAYED PUBLICATION. Words Matter: House Orders Library of Congress to Keep ‘Illegal Alien’ Designation.
I WONDER IF BERNIE SANDERS KNOWS ABOUT THIS? It was the least heralded migration in American history:
At the height of the Depression, several thousand American emigrants left New York on the decks of passenger liners waving goodbye to the Statue of Liberty, bound for Leningrad.
Over 100,000 Americans had applied for jobs working in brand new factories in Soviet Russia, ironically built for Stalin by famous American industrialists such as Henry Ford.
Those American emigrants who entered the “workers’ paradise” were certain that they were leaving the misery of unemployment and poverty behind them. They considered themselves fortunate.
Their optimism would prove to be short-lived. Most were stripped of their American passports soon after their arrival.
Considered suspect by Stalin’s paranoid totalitarian state, the foreigners were swept away in the Terror.
The American jazz clubs, the baseball teams, and the English-language schools set up in cities across the USSR, would quickly vanish with them.
* * * * * * *
In the killing fields at Butovo, a suburb 27 kilometres south-east of Moscow, several of the American baseball players were executed during the Terror, and lie buried in mass graves stretching for hundreds of metres.
Found via Orrin Judd, who sardonically quips, “It seemed like such a good idea at the time…”
THE RICH HIPPIE PARADOX: “So here’s the irony: the left generally hates capitalism, but capitalism changes everybody’s values to be more leftist.”
True — if you’re scrambling to find toilet paper and bread in the workers’ paradise of Venezuela, you’re likely not pausing to study up on the precise details of intersectional feminism and genderfluid deconstructionist poetry.
I’M OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER WHEN LOSING A JOB IN HOLLYWOOD BECAUSE OF YOUR POLITICS WAS CONSIDERED EVIL: New Hollywood Blacklist: Vote GOP, Lose Gigs.
Related: Stacey Dash: “My agent just dropped me because of my politics.”
And yet Hollywood still cranks out the annual obligatory blacklist picture, even knowing that they’ll bomb at the box office, as Oscar bait, and cable TV fodder. (Last year’s Trumbo, whose titular subject was both pro-Stalin, and during the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact, pro-Hitler as well, grossed a paltry $7.3 million at the US box office, despite massive amounts of industry hype.)
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: If Politicians Were Controlled by Space Aliens, Would We Notice? “Interestingly, husband-and-wife producers Robert and Michelle King—the team that created the political-legal drama The Good Wife—sold BrainDead show to CBS back in the fall of 2014, when even the most cynical detractors of American politics could not have foreseen that the next presidential campaign would fought out among a scandalophiliac liar, a stage-four Tourette’s victim, and a raving Vermont socialist who apparently clawed his way out of a 1968 time capsule.”
Heh.
NEW ELEMENT #117 IS named “Tennessine” for the State of Tennessee. Seems only appropriate.
IN THE MAIL: From Congressman David Brat, American Underdog: Proof That Principles Matter.
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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1128.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE. “How Can You Possibly ‘Insult’ a Vegetarian?”, asks Michael Walsh.
Welcome to an America that’s been fundamentally transformed.
YOU WILL BE MADE TO CARE: Federal Officials Push To Urbanize Suburbia Under New HUD Regulation.
In its final months, the Obama administration has set up a strategy to bring inner city living to the suburbs by deploying three federal agencies to dictate to states and local communities how to set up schools, housing and mass transit.
It’s all part of a federal push to reduce economic and racial segregation in favor of diversity.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) expanded the reach of its Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule to two other federal agencies: the Department of Transportation and the Department of Education.
AFFH is a rule established by HUD last year that requires any nationwide locality that receives block grant funding from the agency to rezone neighborhoods based on income and racial prerequisites.
Just more “Curley Effect” tinkering designed to create Democratic voters.
SPENGLER: How Anti-Semitism Became Respectable Again:
When did the old anti-Semitism return? For half a century the horror of a million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis stopped the mouths of the anti-Semites, but that memory has worn off. What Hecht’s interlocutor believed in 1944, most liberals believe today, not to mention the vast majority of Europeans. Yes, the Arabs hate Jews, and express this hatred in a barbaric way, they will allow, but that is because Israel has provoked the hatred.
Tripwires that once seemed taboo are being crossed every day.
Read the whole thing.
NOW IT’S ROBOTS: MINORITIES ALWAYS HAVE TO BE TWICE AS GOOD! U.S. Wants Safety ‘Two Times Better’ for Autonomous Cars.
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THE ARROGANCE OF ONE-PARTY GOVERNMENT IN CALIFORNIA: “The California state Senate voted 28-8 Wednesday to exempt itself from the pointless gun-control laws that apply to the rest of the populace. Legislators apparently think they alone are worthy to pack heat on the streets for personal protection, and the masses ought to wait until the police arrive.”
Related: As More High-Paying Jobs Leave California, State’s Press Is Unconcerned.
Thou shall not disturb the narrative!
SLATE: New Hillary Scandal Checks All the Boxes on the Clinton Controversy Bingo Card.
Hillary Clinton had an undeniably great day on Thursday, but Friday brought a stark reminder that as the presumptive Democratic nominee looks ahead to the general election, there will be plenty of people justifiably looking into her past.
Thanks to a newly released batch of State Department emails, ABC News was able to revisit the story of Rajiv Fernando, a wealthy securities trader who gave heavily to both Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and the Clinton Foundation—and who just so happened to land himself a plum spot on a sensitive government intelligence advisory panel after Hillary became secretary of state.
Politicos rewarding donors is sadly not uncommon but what makes this particular example stand out is Fernando’s lack of qualifications for a job that involved advising the secretary of state—and, by extension, the president of the United States—on the topic of nuclear weapons. And if that weren’t enough, the story also looks an awfully lot like a Clinton Controversy Bingo Card. In addition to the appearance of quid pro quo with a major fundraiser, we also have a clear lack of transparency, Clinton loyalists going to great lengths to protect her, questions over access to sensitive government information, and, of course, Hillary’s private email account.
You can read ABC’s full blow-by-blow here, but the short version is this: The rest of the International Security Advisory Board was filled with nuclear scientists, past Cabinet secretaries, and former members of Congress. But the only thing Fernando had to offer the group was, in ABC’s words, “his technological know-how,” which none of his fellow panelists seemed to find all that helpful. Fernando was so out of place, in fact, that one board member told ABC that none of his colleagues could figure out why he was even there.
Bribes.
AND YET HE HAD HIM AS A GUEST ON HIS SHOW 30 TIMES: David Letterman calls Donald Trump ‘repugnant’ and ‘just despicable’ in new interview but points out the presidential hopeful is doing ‘nothing illegal.’
BURIED LEDE: DEMOCRATS CAN BUILD A WALL. Wells Fargo Center, Xfinity Live! to Be Inside DNC Security Perimeter.
TANSTAAFL: Bernie’s Free College Isn’t Free, Bill Whittle notes in his latest Firewall video.
Related: Student Loans Increasingly Backfire, Leaving Borrowers Worse Off For Going To School, TaxProf notes.
GAWKER IS BANKRUPT, AND NOW LIBERALS ARE PRETENDING TO CARE ABOUT FREE SPEECH:
Take the illiberal New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, a proponent of censorship who is considering using racketeering charges against global warming skeptics. A government official who wants to punish people for thought crimes now has the temerity to talk about freedom of the press. Gawker, by the way, once favorably wrote about arresting climate change deniers. Unlike Michael Mann and Bill Nye and a bunch of AGs, there are those who believe political speech should be protected, and yet also that media organizations should not be immune from the law.
It’s worth once again pointing out that the trial was okayed by judge, the verdict was rendered by a jury, and the decision was upheld by a circuit judge. In no sense does this suit fall under the concept of “frivolous.” Yet liberal writers do not like the outcome mostly because Thiel is politically unacceptable to them and because they don’t like that he was driven by revenge.
Read the whole thing.