NOPE. BUT THE LEFT WOULD CERTAINLY LIKE YOU TO FEEL THAT WAY: Campus Conservatives, You Are Not Alone.
Archive for 2016
June 25, 2016
HONESTLY, THIS CRIMINAL HOAXER SHOULD BE FACING JAIL: Judge rules ‘Jackie’ doesn’t have to turn over any more communications.
“Jackie,” the woman whose fake gang-rape accusation made it to the pages of Rolling Stone Magazine, does not have to turn over additional communications, a judge ruled.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Joel C. Hoppe ruled Tuesday that Jackie’s lawyers “exhausted all known areas of inquiry for responsive communications currently in Jackie’s possession.”
Jackie had claimed that she was gang-raped as part of a fraternity initiation at the University of Virginia. She also claimed that the dean responsible for investigating her claim, Nicole Eramo, was indifferent to her accusation and tried to sweep it under the rug to protect the school’s reputation.
Eramo is suing Rolling Stone for defamation, arguing that the magazine knew Jackie was an unreliable source but published her story anyway. Eramo’s lawyers have argued (and evidence has shown) that Jackie invented the man she claimed she had a date with the night of the alleged incident and who orchestrated the gang-rape. A few weeks ago, Jackie’s lawyers tacitly admitted as much.
Read the whole thing.
MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH:
—Germany’s Der Spiegel, yesterday.
—The Media Research Center, January 27, 2015.
BLOOD LIBEL: Mahmoud Abbas Claims Rabbis Urged Israel to Poison Palestinians’ Water.
Just imagine if the reverse…oh wait.
FLASHBACK: Obama Threatens Brits Against Voting For Brexit.
JOEL KOTKIN: Brexit Will Be Britain’s Fourth Of July.
In many ways, this rebellion’s antecedents include our own revolution, which sought to overturn a distant, and largely unaccountable, bureaucracy. Like Lord North, George III’s prime minister, today’s Eurocratic elites spoke of obligations and fealty to the wisdom of the central imperium. What shocked the centralizers then, and once again today, was the temerity of the governed to challenge the precepts of their betters. . . .
Given the grisly history of internecine warfare on the old continent , the idea of European integration initially had a certain appealing logic. And indeed the early years of integration promised much: greater prosperity, adherence to democracy and even a guarantee that Europe would retain a powerful voice in the world economy and politics. That promise has faded, as Europe remains locked in what appears a more or less permanent cycle of secular decline and stagnation.
Over the past decade, the EU has lagged in terms of both growth and innovation even by our mediocre standards. The EU’s poor performance is recognized well beyond Britain’s borders. Today more than 60 per cent of French voters now hold an unfavorable view of the Union while almost half the electorate in Germany, Spain and the Netherlands have also become Euroskeptic, notes a recent Pew study. In all, these countries’ rejection of the “European project” is even greater than in the UK’s. . . .
These sentiments help explain the rise in support for Brexit. Much of Britain’s hard-pressed middle and working classes are disturbed by the current record immigration, much of it from other EU countries, which has occurred despite Prime Minister David Cameron’s repeated promises to reduce its growth.
Worse, the immigration was a Labour plot to make Britain less British, and its electorate more tractable. More on that here.
Luckily, nothing like that could happen in America.
BEN STEIN ON OUR MAGICAL THINKING ELITES: “Out there, there are riots and people shooting each other. And supposedly serious people are pretending it’s a big civil rights issue whether a fat sweaty 70-year-old man can sit in a toilet stall next to your five-year-old daughter. And a man takes a semi-automatic sporting rifle, and he’s a Muslim. And he’s shouting that he’s going to kill all the people he can in an Orlando nightclub in the name of Allah and ISIS — and the media are debating what his motivation was. And they’re blaming a piece of metal, a totally inert piece of metal, for the murderous acts of a crazy man. And we’re supposed to believe that Islam is a religion of peace… I’ll make this short: the rest of the world is going nuts.”
WELL, IT’S ABOUT TIME THAT SOMETHING WAS: Brexit Could Be a Boon for Lawyers.
A BRITSH LEFTY EXPLAINS BREXIT: Working Class British Voters Led the European Union Rejection.
On Thursday night the first results from Britain’s referendum on pulling out of the European Union came in.
A small clue to the way things were going last night was the vote in the North East.
People in Newcastle are known locally as ‘takems’ (said with a short a, like tack um); those in Sunderland are called ‘makems’. It means that people in Sunderland make things and people in Newcastle take them. Sunderland is solidly industrial, while Newcastle, also a big industrial centre, is a market town. Newcastle voted to remain, but by the tiniest of margins. Sunderland voted to leave, 60-40. That was when we began to think that – not for the first time – the polls had got it wrong.
As the night wore on the results came in, defying the pollster’s determination that the people would reject the referendum question and stick with the European Union.
Of London Boroughs, Barking voted to leave, too. It was historically a ‘white flight’ borough, but today it is thronging with Poles and Africans. It is very working class. Islington, by contrast, was overwhelmingly for stay. Islington has working class wards, though these are mostly demoralised, and the borough deserves its reputation for being dominated by a precociously radical middle class.
Most of all the vote is a popular reaction against the elite. Their view that the European Union is not for them is right. I have taken students to the Brussels Parliament, which is a bit like visiting the offices of the IMF. The only people that you see hanging around outside and waiting to see someone, are themselves very haut bourgeois. By contrast, if you go to the Palace of Westminster, you will see large crowds of school children, nurses, veterans, and ethnic minorities. Parliament is often very bad in its decisions and its cliquishness, but the people do look to it in a way that they will never look on Brussels. That law making should have passed so silently and sneakily off to the European Commission is not something that ordinary British people approve of, and they are right.
The British Labour movement protested against the Maastricht Treaty back in 1991 that created the EU, and had already been committed to a position of withdrawing from the preceding EEC. Labour’s heartlands were in agreement. Over time, though, the temptation of the ‘European Social Chapter’, and the trade union leaders’ resentment at the Tories opt-out of that did tempt some labour leaders (though not their members) to support the EU. That in itself is a symptom of the unions’ loss of influence in their own right; they hoped that their European friends would offer them what their own campaigning could not.
As the Labour Party became more distant, metropolitan and elitist, it sought to re-write the party’s policy to mirror its own concerns, and also to diminish working people’s aspirations for social democratic reform in their favour. . . .
Asked by pollsters why they had voted to leave the EU, some said it was immigration. But more said that it was the question of democracy. This is a word that seems to mean very little to the academics, government officials, constitutional lawyers and politicians, and yet, strangely, means a great deal to those whose access to it is most limited – the greater mass of the British public.
Depressingly, the sulking metropolitans and ‘opinion formers’ (Ha!) dismissed this revolt of the lower orders as nothing more than race prejudice. But that says more about those that say it than those that it is said of. To them almost every expression of popular sentiment feels like fascism.
Read the whole thing.
June 24, 2016
FRASER NELSON: A Very British Revolution.
The world is looking at Britain and asking: What on Earth just happened? Those who run Britain are asking the same question.
Never has there been a greater coalition of the establishment than that assembled by Prime Minister David Cameron for his referendum campaign to keep the U.K. in the European Union. There was almost every Westminster party leader, most of their troops and almost every trade union and employers’ federation. There were retired spy chiefs, historians, football clubs, national treasures like Stephen Hawking and divinities like Keira Knightley. And some global glamour too: President Barack Obama flew to London to do his bit, and Goldman Sachs opened its checkbook.
And none of it worked. The opinion polls barely moved over the course of the campaign, and 52% of Britons voted to leave the EU. That slender majority was probably the biggest slap in the face ever delivered to the British establishment in the history of universal suffrage. . . .
The Brexit campaign started as a cry for liberty, perhaps articulated most clearly by Michael Gove, the British justice secretary (and, on this issue, the most prominent dissenter in Mr. Cameron’s cabinet). Mr. Gove offered practical examples of the problems of EU membership. As a minister, he said, he deals constantly with edicts and regulations framed at the European level—rules that he doesn’t want and can’t change. These were rules that no one in Britain asked for, rules promulgated by officials whose names Brits don’t know, people whom they never elected and cannot remove from office. Yet they become the law of the land. Much of what we think of as British democracy, Mr. Gove argued, is now no such thing.
Instead of grumbling about the things we can’t change, Mr. Gove said, it was time to follow “the Americans who declared their independence and never looked back” and “become an exemplar of what an inclusive, open and innovative democracy can achieve.” Many of the Brexiteers think that Britain voted this week to follow a template set in 1776 on the other side of the Atlantic.
We need more of this spirit, on both sides of the Atlantic.
AT AMAZON, deals on Bestsellers in Jewelry.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Forget The Titanic: Beware The Next Iceberg.
Douthat’s observation it was a pre-existing crisis in the EU which brought about Brexit must be taken as central. Countries don’t usually walk out on a good thing without a reason just as passengers don’t leave 50,000 ton ocean liners for wooden boats without motivation.
The rebellion is real and therefore the causes of the rebellion are also real. Yet even on the day after Brexit, the establishment still found ways to deny the vote was anything more than bigotry and xenophobia run wild. Perhaps the most damning example of its attitude comes from a Tweet by Sharyl Attkisson. “Little known fact: UK Cameron’s campaign adviser was Jim Messina who was Obama’s campaign adviser & heads biggest pro-Hillary super PAC.” Faced with the threat of an EU breakup, the foreign policy crisis of a lifetime Obama sent a spin-doctor and gave a speech — and it didn’t work. . . .
That’s it: Jim Messina and a little teaching moment would be all it would take. All those who are still debating the question of whether Obama’s disasters are due to malice or stupidity can chew on this gold-plated, hold-my-beer example of jen-yoo-wine idiocy as a new data point.
Brexit, for all its drama, was merely a warning. The basic demand is for a moderation of the centralizing tendencies, unchecked immigration, runaway political correctness and metastatic government that have characterized the West in these last decades. That’s the bottom line. Unfortunately conceding these demands requires overcoming so much momentum that the captain committee on the bridge has despaired of effecting it. But do it they must. All Brexit has done is give warning. It has started the clock. The rest is up to the West.
Indeed it is.
THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D EXPECTED: Geneva to get ‘café fellatio’ by end of year. “A firm in Geneva plans to open a café where customers can enjoy oral sex while they sip their morning coffee.”
IT’S NOT JUST BREXIT: Six Times Barack Obama Backed Losers.
YOU COULD SAY THE SAME THING ABOUT A TRUMP PRESIDENCY:
IT PROBABLY SMELLS BETTER THAN NEW YORK: Smelly Postcards Will Give You A Whiff Of Rosetta’s Comet.
IN LOCAL NEWS: The Colorado Springs Gazette did a story on Michael Girard and his 3 Hundred Days of Shine distillery here in Monument.
The area’s sole moonshine-focused distillery opened September 2014. Girard has produced a whole lot of his flavored liquor since. His distributor picks up at least 300 cases once a month – each containing 12 Mason jars as opposed to the traditional six-bottle cases of other liquors – and ships them to more than 250 liquor stores statewide. This month’s order, which he finished bottling Monday afternoon, totaled $25,400. That figure is $4,000 short, he said, because he did not have enough moonshine ready for the full order.
He never had trouble keeping up with demand until this month, he said. The year-and-a-half-old business has peaked at $30,000 per month, and Girard only sees that number growing. He used to run his still once a week and had enough to get by, but he presently finds himself running twice a week and in need of more help with bottling. He remains optimistic nevertheless.
“Even if demand picks up, I’ve only been running at about 30 percent capacity,” he said. “If I need to run that still four days a week and quadruple my production, I can do that.”
Good to know. I’ve been in a few times, and I’ll keep going back. The Centennial Wheat ‘shine drinks a lot like bourbon — highly recommended if you ever find yourself on the Front Range.
AND THE ROLE OF T. CODDINGTON VAN VOORHEES VII WILL BE PLAYED BY… ‘This Is Not My Party’: George Will Goes from GOP to Unaffiliated.
(Classical reference in headline.)
NOT REALLY A MYSTERY: Here’s why New York City smells so rancid in the summer.
THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: As It Searches for Suspects, the FBI May Be Looking at You: Questions about accuracy and transparency plague the bureau’s five-year-old face matching system.
ANOTHER GREAT RESTRUCTURING IN EUROPE? The Brexit contagion: How France, Italy and the Netherlands now want their referendum too.