BECAUSE THEY KNOW HISTORY: Amid The Rubble, Some Turkish Kurds Wary Of EU-Ankara Deal .
Archive for 2016
March 19, 2016
CLUELESS IDIOT ABROAD: Finds that the Middle East is not like Western countries and ISIS sucks. Of course, he might have been spared if our schools actually taught and our media actually informed.
AND YET IT’S REALITY: Students freak out after teacher shows video of ISIS beheading.
AND THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE: Hillary Has an NSA Problem.
I DON’T BELIEVE IT. WE’RE A LONG WAY FROM “WITH FOLDED HANDS”: A lot of people who make over $350,000 are about to get replaced by software.
LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Corrupt Feedback Loops: Justice Dept. Extortion.
21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Altered Mosquitoes Quietly Tested in the U.S. “Bacteria-laden mosquitoes produce offspring that die quickly. China and the U.S. are releasing millions into the wild.”
TERROR: Salah Abdeslam, Suspect in Paris Attacks, Is Captured in Brussels. In the Islamist-infested neighborhood of Molonbeeck.
JESSE WALKER: Third Parties: A Beginners’ Guide. I used to be a third-party enthusiast, but not so much any more.
THIS IS EXCELLENT NEWS: Dengue vaccine proves 100% effective in human trials. “An experimental vaccine against the dengue virus has been found to protect 100 percent of recipients in a clinical trial carried out by the USA’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). In the NIAID trial 21 people were vaccinated with TV003, while 20 received a placebo. Six months later they returned to be infected with a mild version of dengue-2. All 21 people who’d received the vaccine were protected against infection. All 20 members of the placebo group contracted dengue. A modified version of the vaccine is now being developed in an attempt to treat the related Zika virus.”
MILO YIANNOPOULOS: I’M GAY AND I’VE BEEN BANNED FROM SAN FRANCISCO! “The city has a fetish for banning things (among many other weird fetishes, some of which are OK I guess). Things that are currently unwelcome in San Francisco: McDonalds Happy Meals, Segways, plastic bags, soda vending machines, and gay people with opinions…It’s little wonder that companies like Twitter and Facebook, based in San Francisco, are so rapidly descending into the wacky politics of social justice, censorship, and blatant anti-conservatism.”
Read the whole thing.
Related: The Status Quo City — Celebrated for its openness, San Francisco has a hard time with change.
HULK HOGAN GETS $115M VERDICT AGAINST GAWKER AT SEX TAPE TRIAL. “A stunned-looking Nick Denton watched from the gallery and took a deep breath. Gawker has already indicated it will appeal.”
Related: “Enjoying all the First Amendment posturing on behalf of Gawker by people totally cool with campus totalitarianism,” Iowahawk tweets.
More: “The jury must still consider whether to impose punitive damages next week. ‘We’re coming back Monday for the rest of it,’ [Hogan’s lawyer David Houston] said,” according to CNN. Plus these quotes from Kenneth Turkel, another of Hogan’s attorneys:
Turkel invoked a 2013 interview in which Denton said “invasion of privacy has incredibly positive effects on society.”
“Who thinks like that?” the attorney asked incredulously.
On two occasions, Turkel seemed to suggest that Denton and his company don’t share the Florida jury’s values.
“This guy is up there in New York sitting behind a computer playing god with other people’s lives,” Turkel said of Denton. Turkel also scoffed that Daulerio wrote in his 2012 commentary that “the Internet has made it easier for all of us to be shameless voyeurs and deviants.”
“I’m not so sure all of us are shameless voyeurs and deviants,” Turkel said. “They may be up there on Fifth Avenue at Gawker.”
Shades of Ted Cruz’s “New York Values” meme.
I BLAME SKYNET: What’s Frying the Electrical Systems on BART Trains?
CARL’S JR. CEO WANTS TO TRY AUTOMATED RESTAURANT WHERE CUSTOMERS ‘NEVER SEE A PERSON.’
As an earlier, saner New York Times admitted in 1987, the true minimum wage is always zero.
CREEPY: FTC warns developers about apps that listen to other devices for advertisers.
The Federal Trade Commission has sent warning letters to 12 Android app developers apparently using controversial “SilverPush” ad software. When used, the software can detect so-called “audio beacons” inaudibly emitted by devices like televisions, giving third-party advertisers more information on viewing habits.
The FTC does not name the app developers, but says the developers were sent warning letters after it was determined that their apps on the Google Play Store were apparently using SilverPush code. Although, as the FTC notes, the creators of SilverPush say the software is not yet used in the United States, the warning letters say the apps are requesting microphone permissions without a clear need for them, and do not appear to properly notify users.
Here’s a support page from Google on how to review and limit your Android phone’s permissions.
TAKE ME OUT OF THE BALLGAME: “Adam LaRoche walked away — walked away — from $13 million dollars, just in order to ensure that he spent more time with his son than on a baseball diamond, away from his home half the year. Not being a father myself, it’s hard for me to relate, but I don’t know if I could walk away like he did. It says a lot about LaRoche as a man, and more importantly, as a father. This is also an important story, because fathers today get a pretty bad rap. If pop culture is a reflection of the times in which we live, television fathers have gone from strong dads like Ward Cleaver and Ben Cartwright, to ridiculous buffoons like Al Bundy and Peter Griffin. The nuclear family is seen as less and less important by more and more people every day.”
Read the whole thing.
THE ORIGINAL HOLOCAUST: Coming clean with Germany’s dark past in Namibia. I seem to recall my African-historian brother telling me that some of the German troops who did this wound up helping the Turks in Armenia, and then working on the Holocaust in Germany. So it really was the original.
FORMER WAPO LEGEND CARL BERNSTEIN INADVERTENTLY EXPLAINS TRUMP’S RISE. Carl Bernstein Rejects Comparing Trump to ‘Principled’ Barry Goldwater: “I think Donald Trump is an authoritarian. He’s not an ideologue, he’s not a principled man in the way that Goldwater was….I think that the times are different and I think the people are altogether different,” Bernstein tells CNN’s Don Lemon. Earlier this week, as Mediaite notes, Bernstein “told CNN’s Brian Stelter that Trump is ‘a new kind of fascist in our culture’ with an ‘authoritarian demagogic point of view.’”
I’d much rather a proto-libertarian such as Barry Goldwater as president than a center-left celebrity candidate such as Trump. But to paraphrase the famous sign seen at Tea Party rallies in 2009 which read “It Doesn’t Matter What This Sign Says, You’ll Call It Racism Anyway,” it doesn’t matter who the GOP runs, you’ll call him a Nazi anyway. Celebrities from Louis CK to Sarah Silverman are pulling out all of the fascist references to Trump (Silverman even appeared with a brown uniform and tiny mustache to criticize Trump on Conan O’Brien’s show last week.) But no less a figure than Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News in 1964 insinuated that Goldwater the champion of small government, whose father was Jewish was a Nazi, as left-leaning Cronkite biographer Douglas Brinkley wrote in 2012:
As managing editor of the CBS Evening News, Cronkite seemed to relish pricking Goldwater from time to time for sport. In late July, he introduced a report from CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr, a hard-and-fast liberal working from Munich. With an almost tongue-in-cheek smile, Cronkite said, “Whether or not Senator Goldwater wins the nomination, he is going places, the first place being Germany.” Schorr then went on a tear, saying, “It looks as though Senator Goldwater, if nominated, will be starting his campaign in Bavaria, the center of Germany’s right wing.” The backstory was merely that Goldwater had accepted an invitation from Lieutenant General William Quinn for a quick holiday at Berchtesgaden, a U.S. Army recreational center in Germany. But Schorr made the takeaway point that Berchtesgaden was once “Hitler’s stomping ground.” Goldwater, trying to show off his NATO bona fides, had granted an interview with Der Spiegel in which he mentioned a possible trip to Germany soon. Some Democratic opposition researcher floated the idea that Goldwater was infatuated with the Nazis. It was ugly stuff.
Indeed it was; but then, every Republican presidential candidate, from Thomas Dewey (smeared as a Nazi by no less than Harry Truman) to the present will be attacked by the left in this fashion, no matter his temperament, or his small government, libertarian bona fides. Speaking of temperament, perhaps Bernstein would have preferred a more milquetoast CEO as president than Trump – say, Mitt Romney. But in 2012, the Daily Beast ran one of Bernstein’s columns titled “Carl Bernstein on Mitt Romney’s Radicalism,” which, as Accuracy in Media noted at the time:
The article is based on anonymous sources who claim to be associated with the “moderate” wing of the GOP and are warning about the “crazy right” that might entice Mitt Romney to govern as an extremist as president. “Plainly put,” Bernstein says, “today’s Republican Party (and its Tea Party wing) represent the first bona fide radical political party to rise to dominance in Washington in nearly 100 years.”
At a time when we have a Democratic Party in power in the White House, led by a politician with links to communists and terrorists in Hawaii and Chicago, the Bernstein article has to be seen as ridiculous on its face. But Bernstein represents the mentality of much of the media who see the far-left orientation of the national Democratic Party as nothing unusual or worth commenting on.
Bernstein’s 2,100-word article is full of bizarre statements about Romney and the GOP.
Alluding to the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement, Bernstein writes, “It represents as extreme a shift in political philosophy as any of the radical ideologies that have prevailed in our history.”
Tea Party members oppose Big Government, excessive federal spending and debt. Bernstein is claiming that it is somehow “radical” to want to return to the founding principles of the United States and save America from financial bankruptcy and economic ruin. Who is the real radical?
To ask the question is to answer it. As Glenn noted earlier, in regards to David Brooks, “The Tea Party movement — which you also failed to understand, and thus mostly despised — was a bourgeois, well-mannered effort (remember how Tea Party protests left the Mall cleaner than before they arrived?) to fix America. It was treated with contempt, smeared as racist, and blocked by a bipartisan coalition of business-as-usual elites. So now you have Trump, who’s not so well-mannered, and his followers, who are not so well-mannered, and you don’t like it.”
Exit quote: “The lowest form of popular culture – lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives – has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein, 1992. Choose the form of your destructor.
UPDATE: In his 1944 State of the Union address, FDR smeared the laissez–faire Coolidge era of the 1920s as “the spirit of fascism:”
One of the great American industrialists of our day—a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis-recently emphasized the grave dangers of “rightist reaction” in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called “normalcy” of the 1920′s—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.
Classy stuff.
And of course, Nixon was far from immune from receiving “Reductio ad Hitlerum:” “In 1971, the year before the Watergate scandal, President Richard Nixon was described by his Democratic rival George McGovern as a warmonger like Hitler. ‘Except for Adolf Hitler’s extermination of the Jewish people, the American bombardment of defenseless peasants in Indochina is the most barbaric act of modern times,’ said McGovern. After the arrests of the five agents who broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters, McGovern said Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate break-in was ‘the kind of thing you expect under a person like Hitler.’”
UPDATE (5/1/20): Since I’ve rounded up numerous examples of Republican presidents and candidates being slurred as National Socialists by the left in this post, I’m adding a link to “Democrats and Their Reductio ad Hitlerum Slander” by Steve Hayward of Power Line, which sets the clock back from ’44 to 1940:
By now we are used to Democrats calling Trump literally Hitler, just as they did for George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, etc., but [Fred Siegel in his 1984 book, Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan] points out that this favorite liberal calumny began at least as early as 1940:
If Republicans diehards insisted that Roosevelt was “that Bolshevik in the White House,” ideological New Dealers returned the favor by denouncing conservative Republicans as fascists. Henry Wallace, the point man for the New Dealers, fought the 1940 election with the slogan “Keep Hitler out of the White House.” Wallace conceded that “every Republican is not an appeaser. But you can be sure that every Nazi, every Hitlerite, and every appeaser is a Republican.” Wallace glossed over the isolationism of leading Democrats like Burton Wheeler who were left-leaning at home yet impassioned appeasers. [Siegel might have included Joseph Kennedy here.] . . .
At their harshest, fervent New Dealers dropped the qualifiers and pronounced Wendell Willkie, Roosevelt’s middle-of-the-road Republican opponent, “the man Hitler wants elected president.”
Things really got rolling with the 1944 election, where the Democrats’ reductio ad Hitlerum argument was directed at Thomas E. Dewey.
Read on for the rest, which is a sneak preview of the attack Dewey would receive from Harry Truman as the 1948 election approached the wire.
UPDATE (10/23/2024): Peter J. Hasson of the Washington Free Beacon, collated a few more recent violations of Godwin’s Law:
Jewish advocacy groups led an avalanche of sharp criticism yesterday against two potential television ads that compare President Bush to Adolf Hitler and were posted on a Web site run by MoveOn.org.
—The Washington Times, January 5th, 2004.
● Michelle Goldberg compares Ann Romney to Hitler on TV show.
—The London Daily Mail, May 14th, 2012.
● Top California Democrat likens Ryan to Nazi propagandist.
A top California Democratic Party official on Monday compared Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan to Nazi Germany’s infamous propagandist Joseph Goebbels, drawing rebukes from both parties the day before the Democratic Party’s nominating convention formally begins.
In a story reported Monday by the San Francisco Chronicle, California Democratic Party Chairman John Burton was quoted as comparing distortions Ryan made in campaign speeches to lies used by Goebbels, a fierce anti-Semite and one of Adolf Hitler’s closest cohorts.
—Reuters, September 3rd, 2012.
● South Carolina Dem chair compares Haley to Hitler mistress.
South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Dick Harpootlian compared his state’s Republican governor, Nikki Haley, to Eva Braun, the longtime mistress of Adolf Hitler.
—The Washington Post, September 5, 2012.
LAME DUCK IS A DISH BEST SERVED COLD: Queen refuses to return to London to meet President Obama. “Instead, accompanied by his security circus, he’ll trundle to Windsor in his bomb-proof, seven-ton limo* for lunch…‘he’d be well advised not to give a pro-EU sermon over lunch after the row about the Queen supporting Brexit,’ says my source.”
* “Obama’s Carbon Admission: ‘I Have the World’s Largest Carbon Footprint.’”