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Archive for 2017
April 16, 2017
THE BLACK BLOC TACTICS OF THE LEFT ARE breeding an effectively violent opposition. It’s not like I didn’t warn them that this would happen. . . .
REMINDER: We hated millennials well before ‘Girls’ came along.
To be sure, “Girls” will be contemplated ad nauseum in the days and years to come, likely forever destined to serve as an accepted representation of life in the Obama era.
“Millennials” and their reputations, for better or worse, are permanently hitched to its depiction of inordinately ambitious, overprivileged, socially conscious narcissists struggling to cope with the darker realities of adult life in a politically-charged environment. But one hot take that seems to have found backers in this time of reflection posits that “Girls” itself introduced the world to those stereotypes, engendering a hatred of millennials among our disapproving elders.
It did not.
In fact, “Girls” exploited that stereotype, injecting its cast of insufferable antiheroes with the very tendencies people had already come to associate with our generation. Some of those stereotypes are fair, others are not. But everyone already hated them before “Girls” reminded us of it.
Yeah, pretty much.
AND YET THEY LEARNED NO LESSONS FROM THIS: California Legalized Selling Food Made At Home And Created Over A Thousand Local Businesses. If only it were possible to draw some sort of . . . general principle from this experience.
I THOUGHT TEEN VOGUE COULDN’T GET STUPIDER, BUT I WAS WRONG AGAIN: How to Avoid Cultural Appropriation at Coachella.
21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Your ‘Westworld’ sexbot is almost here.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Feminism: An Excuse to Exploit Women? Complaint exposes the ugly consequences of ‘social justice.’
On her LinkedIn profile, Chelsea Leibow calls herself a “Patriarchy-Smashing PR Priestess.” In a complaint filed last month with New York’s Human Rights Commission, however, Ms. Leibow calls herself a victim of sexual harassment. According to Ms. Leibow, while she was employed by the Manhattan-based firm Thinx, her boss “groped female underlings’ breasts, pranced around the office naked, and video-chatted workers from the toilet.”
The alleged perpetrator of these offenses was not the “patriarchy,” but rather Thinx CEO Miki Agrawal, a self-declared feminist whose company specialized in marketing blood-absorbing underwear for menstruating women.
Inconceivable!
OH, THAT FAKE NEWS: HuffPo Finally Retracts Column Titled “Could It Be Time To Deny White Men The Franchise [to vote]?,” Admits Author “Appears Not To Exist.”
“This retraction comes following Huffington Post South Africa’s Editor In Chief Verashni Pillay actually defended the article’s place on the site,” Milo Yiannopoulos adds.
ANTI-CHRISTIAN GOOGLE CELEBRATES EASTER BY IGNORING IT.
Hey give ‘em credit – at least they didn’t have a doodle of Cesar Chavez on Easter this year.
THIS IS FUNNY BECAUSE SOME RIGHT-LEANING FORMER LAWPROF COLLEAGUES OF WARREN’S SAY THE SAME ABOUT HER: Elizabeth Warren Says Mitch McConnell Won’t Even Say Hello To Her. And frankly, ignoring Elizabeth Warren seems like a good use of one’s time.
BRITAIN’S FOREIGN SECRETARY ON ASSAD’S CHEMICAL WEAPONS:
Boris Johnson:
“Assad uses chemical weapons because they are not only horrible and indiscriminate. They are also terrifying.
“In that sense he is himself an arch-terrorist, who has caused such an unquenchable thirst for revenge that he can never hope to govern his population again. In that sense he is himself an arch-terrorist, who has caused such an unquenchable thirst for revenge that he can never hope to govern his population again.
“He is literally and metaphorically toxic, and it is time Russia awoke to that fact. They still have time to be on the right side of the argument.”
He also said British scientists had confirmed that “sarin or a sarin-like substance” was used in the April 4 attack. Sarin is a nerve agent. Obama didn’t get rid of Assad’s chemical arsenal. Obama lied. People continue to die.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Jon Gabriel: Trump’s Budget Cuts Don’t Go Far Enough.
SECESSION BREEDS SECESSION: Break away from the USA? The effort to cleave California faces its own split. Large parts of the state are effectively unrepresented in Sacramento, the fruit of Baker v. Carr and Reynolds v. Sims.
THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: “I’m a Black Man in America. I’m part of an oppressed group. But as a cis straight male, I share in unearned privileges in this society.” Well, you certainly haven’t earned the privilege of being taken seriously with this piece. . . .
RIP ALLAN HOLDSWORTH; the brilliant jazz-fusion guitarist died unexpectedly at age 70.
His early album I.O.U. was a favorite of mine and my guitar teacher when I first started playing, and I still play it on a regular basis. I had hoped to see him play live at least once, but I did get to interview him by phone for a piece Guitar World assigned me a decade ago on the history of Carvin guitars, which he endorsed. Incredibly charming and understated man — you had no idea that you were speaking with a guitarist so good, he influenced Eddie Van Halen and about whom jazz-fusion pioneer John McLaughlin (also equipped with monster chops) was quoted as saying, “I’d steal everything Allan was doing, if only I could figure out what the heck it was that he was doing.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Here’s How You Build A 100 MPH Bumper Car.
KOREA, AND MORE KOREA: Well, East Asia is on the edge of war –renewed war, for the Korean War never officially ended. Today on ABC New’s This Week, National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster sent Kim Jong Un a very specific message regarding his military technology.
Hours after North Korea paraded its weaponry and attempted a missile launch, President Trump’s national security adviser said the U.S. leader will not allow Kim Jong Un’s regime to have the capacity to threaten the U.S.
“While it’s unclear and we do not want to telegraph in any way how we’ll respond to certain incidents, it’s clear that the president is determined not to allow this kind of capability to threaten the United States,” Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster told ABC News’ Martha Raddatz in an exclusive interview on “This Week” Sunday. “Our president will take action that is in the best interest of the American people.”
North Korea rolled out ballistic missiles and other weaponry at a huge parade Saturday and later in the day, at 5:21 p.m. ET, made a failed attempt to shoot off a missile, which exploded immediately after launch.
McMaster said the launch “fits a pattern of provocative and destabilizing and threatening behavior on the part of the North Korean regime.”
The article includes a tweet from President Trump: “Why would I call China a currency manipulator when they are working with us on the North Korean problem? We will see what happens!”
Yes, art of the deal meets art of war. China got a taste of that in December 2016.
As for North Korea, McMaster made it clear the U.S. prefers a peaceful solution.
“What (is) particularly difficult about — about dealing with this regime, is that it is unpredictable,” he said. “It’s time for us to undertake all actions we can, short of a military option, to try to resolve this peacefully,” he said.
The Korean War ended with an armistice, not a peace agreement. That’s not an irrelevant point. The Kim regime thinks it can still win.
BLESS HER HEART: Maxine Waters Leads Tax March Crowd in ‘Impeach 45’ Chant.
(Classical reference in headline.)
IT’S AS IF ALL THIS “EMOLUMENTS” STUFF IS JUST CRAP: George Washington was the first president to stay in the real estate business. “By the 1790s, Washington was wealthy primarily because of real estate — renting and selling his vast holdings. As with Mr. Trump’s hotels, Washington’s renters or purchasers could include foreigners. The president received constant reports from his nephew and subsequent managers and wrote to them at least monthly… This belies the notion that the Constitution limits a president’s management of, or benefit from, his existing business ventures.”
The childish reaction to Trump’s election by Democrats — and some Republicans — goes a long way all by itself toward demonstrating that our political class isn’t fit to rule, or even to talk about those who do in any sort of intelligent fashion.
FLASHBACK: D.C. McAllister: Male Strength Should Be Celebrated, Not Replaced With Girly Men. Happily, she’s not the only woman to feel that way.
IT’S COME TO THIS: McDonalds Should Not Bring Back Szechuan Sauce Because It’s ‘Low-Key Racist.’
Steve Easterbrook, McDonald’s British-born CEO, announced his plans to transform the chain into a “modern, progressive burger company” back in 2015. Don’t say you weren’t warned what would be following.
(Via Maggie’s Farm.)
B-24 LIBERATOR MEMORIAL: In WW2 my uncle, Burt Jones, flew the US Navy’s anti-submarine warfare variant of the B-24 Liberator. StrategyPage’s WW2 aircraft series has two B-24 photos of the Army version. One is a dramatic snapshot of a B-24 bomb strike. The other photo shows a single B-24 in flight. Its caption mentions the Navy model PB4Y-2 Privateer. I recall Uncle Burt telling me that his squadron began operations in North Africa using Army B-24s. The planes had some modifications for anti-submarine warfare and long-range over-water patrol, but the Army Air Forces and the Navy basically flew the same bomber. Wikipedia says the USN didn’t get the Privateer variant until 1944, so it looks like the historical record reinforces the memory. After WW2 Uncle Burt became a commercial helicopter pilot. He spent a lot of time supporting firefighting operations in the Pacific Northwest. He passed away last month, on March 12, at the age of 93. Easter is a day of peace. Uncle Burt was the kind of courageous man who defended freedom and made peace. My family cherishes his service and his memory.