THEY TOLD ME IF TRUMP WERE ELECTED WE’D SEE OPEN RACIAL DISCRIMINATION. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! White males need not apply for this $10,000 social justice journalism grant: Open only to women and journalists of color.
Archive for 2017
August 10, 2017
SHOOT THEM DOWN, ALL OF THEM: North Korea Plans to Launch 4 ‘Crucial Warning’ Missiles at Guam to be Ready by Mid-Month.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why do progressives think inflatable chickens and papier-mâché puppet heads accomplish anything?
FAKE NEWS? Russian surveillance plane soars over the Pentagon, Capitol and other Washington sights.
A Russian surveillance plane soared through secure airspace over Washington on Wednesday, presumably collecting intelligence as it traveled near the Pentagon, the Capitol and other government buildings, two U.S. officials said.
The Russian Air Force Tupolev Tu-154 aircraft made the flight through the Treaty on Open Skies, which Russia, the United States and 32 other nations have signed. The treaty established criteria under which countries can make unarmed observation flights over the soil of other treaty members in an effort to promote transparency and international arms control efforts, according to the State Department.
The Capitol Police issued an alert Wednesday that warned that an “authorized low-altitude aircraft” would enter restricted airspace between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. The alert did not state who owned the plane, but said it “will be large and may fly directly over the U.S. Capitol.”
The treaty was signed in 1992 and has been in effect since 2002, so I’m not sure why WaPo and CNN are suddenly making a big deal out of it, unless it’s to make Trump appear ineffectual on Russia.
INSIDERS’ GAME: Attorney for Loretta Lynch at Justice Department now at committee investigating Lynch.
An attorney in the Justice Department who helped edit press statements about the tarmac meeting between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch is now a top attorney for Democrats in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is currently investigating Lynch over concerns she may have tried to influence the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton.
The connection, first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, comes after hundreds of pages of emails about the infamous “tarmac” meeting were released by two conservative watchdog groups who had filed Freedom of Information Act requests for documents about the meeting from the Justice Department.
Paige Herwig was a counselor to the then-Attorney General Lynch in 2016 when the airplane meeting between Clinton and Lynch took place. According to her LinkedIn profile and other sources, she now serves as the deputy general counsel for the minority in the Senate Judiciary.
Because both the majority and minority parties each have their own staff, Herwig is one of several lawyers who will have access to and knowledge of how the Senate Judiciary’s investigation of Lynch is proceeding, with many of those other attorneys being Republicans who serve Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and the other GOP members on the committee.
Sounds like a conflict of interest to me, but as we know, those only matter with Republicans.
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY: Google’s ‘tolerance’ requires repression.
Michael Barone:
“Part of building an open, inclusive environment,” said Google’s vice president “for diversity, integrity and governance,” “means fostering a culture in which those with alternative views, including different political views, feel safe sharing their opinions. But” — key word — “that discourse needs to work alongside the principles of equal employment found in our Code of Conduct, policies and anti-discrimination laws.”
Similarly, Google’s CEO said Tuesday, “We strongly support the right of Googlers to express themselves. However” — key word — “portions of the memo violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace.”
George Orwell would recognize this doublespeak. We totally support free speech except when we call it heresy. Tolerance requires repression.
Ironically, for a company that makes money by transmitting information, Google’s position is intellectually incoherent. What its CEO dismisses as “harmful gender stereotypes” are the conclusions, after years of painstaking research, of serious neuroscientists.
And Google’s tacit endorsement of the quasi-religious dogma that a fair society must produce gender balance and proportionate ethnic representation is at war with both experience and logic.
Mostly though this progressive dogma is at war with both liberty and individual rights.
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’: Supporter Of California Secession Movement: ‘Our Values Are Different’ Than The United States.
“This is California. We’re not the United States. Our values are different,” said Shankar Singram, vice president of the California Freedom Coalition. “We’re fundamentally different in how we act and speak and think about the world globally. Whether it has to do with war, the climate, the environment. We’re just a different state.”
He added, “We are going to do things that are beneficial for our state, and we disregard what the United States thinks or even their laws,” pointing to sanctuary cities and marijuana laws as examples where California is currently defying the feds.
As reported by Western Journalism, Californians may soon get the opportunity to vote to secede. The state’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, issued an official ballot measure title last week allowing CalExit supporters to start gathering the 585,000 signatures needed to place the matter before California voters in 2018.
It’s an interesting thought experiment, what Californians would vote themselves if as a sovereign nation they were able to print their own money.
AT AMAZON, 70% off or more on Pans.
THE HILL: Obama donors not committing to Biden.
Maybe they’re worried about his “Creepy Uncle Joe” persona.
Flashback: Biden Swims Naked, Upsetting Female Secret Service Agents:
“Agents say that, whether at the vice president’s residence or at his home in Delaware, Biden has a habit of swimming in his pool nude,” Kessler writes in the book – due for release Aug. 5.
“Female Secret Service agents find that offensive,” he writes.
“Biden likes to be revered as everyday Joe,” an unnamed agent told Kessler. “But the reality is no agents want to go on his detail because Biden makes agents’ lives so tough.”
Plus: Washington Post: What Are We Going To Do About Creepy Uncle Joe Biden?
Also: Joe Biden’s Woman-Touching Habit.
Related: Talking Points Memo: Why Does Creepy Uncle Joe Biden Get A Pass From Liberals?
Plus:
NORKS TARGET GUAM, TRUMP SASSES MCCONNELL, AND DWS DOES DEMOCRATS DISASTROUS DESTRUCTION: That and more in Liz Sheld’s morning brief.
RED ON RED: Top Trump donor ponies up to take out Flake.
One of Donald Trump’s most generous political benefactors is providing a six-figure donation to a super PAC devoted to unseating Sen. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican who has been fiercely critical of the president.
Robert Mercer, a reclusive hedge fund billionaire who was intimately involved in Trump’s rise and helped to bankroll his 2016 campaign, is contributing $300,000 to a super PAC supporting former state Sen. Kelli Ward, who is challenging Flake in a Republican primary next year.
It’s the latest sign that Trump’s political machine is preparing to take on Flake, whose persistent attacks have angered the president. The White House has met with Ward and two other Republicans who are mulling primary challenges to the Arizona senator, former state Treasurer Jeff DeWit and former state GOP Chairman Robert Graham.
Arizona sure seems to like its mavericks.
REASON TV: How Freedom Made Us Rich.
“In [1492], if you were going to bet on who was going to have a ‘Great Enrichment,'” says University of Illinois at Chicago economist Deirdre McCloskey, “you would have been crazy not to bet on China because China had the most advanced commercial institutions, the most advanced ship building technology, [and] the most advanced machinery all together.” But it didn’t work out that way.
“My claim,” McCloskey says, “is that liberty was the key to modern economic growth.”
In her new book, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, the third volume in a trilogy, McCloskey argues that our vast accumulation of wealth over the past two hundred years— which she’s dubbed “The Great Enrichment”—was the result of “massively better ideas in technology and institutions.” Where did they arise from? “A new liberty and dignity for commoners,” she argues, “expressed as the ideology of European liberalism.”
Naturally, all the Gramscian-damaged are now working to put that to an end.
THERE’S A LOT OF MONEY IN THAT PINK SLIME: Disney pays at least $177 million to settle ‘pink slime’ case.
Real news about fake news:
Walt Disney Co paid $177 million, in addition to insurance recoveries, to settle the closely watched “pink slime” defamation case against its ABC network by Beef Products Inc., a quarterly financial report shows.
Privately-held BPI sued American Broadcasting Company (ABC) in 2012 for $5.7 billion, saying it and reporter Jim Avila had defamed the company by using the “pink slime” tag, and making errors and omissions in a series of reports that year.
Disney and BPI, which calls the product “lean finely textured beef,” came to an undisclosed settlement in June, 3-1/2 weeks after a trial began in South Dakota, where BPI is based.
Disney reported the settlement of the litigation in a footnote to its financial report, saying it was seeking additional insurance proceeds to recover its cash payment.
The financial tables show a charge of $177 million described as being “in connection with settlement of litigation.” The figure is not directly linked to the “pink slime” case, but the BPI litigation is the only one Disney specifies in the report.
Classical reference, as Ed likes to add, in the headline.
ROD DREHER ON THE RELIGION OF IDENTITY LIBERALISM. There is no “right” and “wrong” there; there is only “good” and “evil:”
The problem with Identity Liberalism is not that it seeks to create workplaces that are fair to men and women both, and to people of all races, and so forth. We all want that, or ought to. The problem is only partly that it’s criteria for judging the fairness of a workplace are contradictory and unfair, as Dr. Miller points out above. The core of the problem is that identity liberalism construes disagreement as heresy, and viciously punishes heretics.
And it is therefore impossible for identity liberalism, and the institutions that embrace it, to self-correct, because all criticism is treated as evil. The critic finds himself, like [Google’s James Damore], defending not his thesis (which may or may not be wrong), but his moral worth.
If you want that kind of society, vote Democratic. If you want a society that turns into a war of all against all, based on race, sex, and whatnot, vote Democratic. That’s what it seems like to a lot of us. We are not about to swim to shore and volunteer to be netted, because we hate ourselves and our sons and daughters so much that we believe we deserve to have our careers sacrificed for the sake of creating Utopia.
Read the whole thing.
THE INSTA-WIFE: The Dangers Of Tinder for Men. ” It’s important for men to monitor their dates more carefully and to fight back in court like this man when things go wrong.” Even a moderately credible threat of fighting back in court will make it less likely that this sort of thing will happen, of course.
ONE TOLD BY ELITES WHO DESPISE YOU: Another Big Lie of the Contemporary Art World Revealed.
THOSE PEACEFUL ALL FEMALE PLANETS:The Myth of the Peaceful Woman.
OR, YOU KNOW, NOT WANTING TO BE STRIPPED OF YOUR CIVIL RIGHTS: Lawyer: ‘Misogyny’ Behind Demands for Due Process in Campus Sex Assault Cases.
IT’S OKAY WHEN THEIR SIDE DOES IT:Austin Theater Admits It Broke the Law with ‘Women Only’ Screenings of ‘Wonder Woman’.
AFTER FORCING POISONOUS LIGHTBULBS ON US, WHY WOULD IT SURPRISE ANYONE THAT THE GOVERNMENT WANTS TO FORCE OTHER UNRELIABLE TECHNOLOGIES DOWN OUR THROATS: Federal Bill Seeks To Block Sales Of Pistols Lacking Microstamping Technology.
OR, AFTER A FEW BEERS, YOU JUST THINK YOU’RE THINKING CLEARLY:Turns out drinking beer could help you think clearly.
SHERLOCK HOLMES INVESTIGATES DEBBIE WASSERMAN-SCHULTZ AND HER ROGUE COMPUTER TECHNICIANS. (bumped)
Don’t you dare sneer until you read it. Sherlock has a lot more credibility than the sensationalist climatologists at The New York Times. The sensationalist climatologists claimed they had a scoop. Except they didn’t. Holmes, like Detective Sergeant Joe Friday (LAPD-TV), just has the facts, ma’am.