MARK STEYN: Jihad On The Bike Path.
Archive for 2017
November 1, 2017
“I DON’T KNOW”: DNC Chief Stonewalls Reporters On Payments To Fusion GPS.
Perez refused to disclose any basic information about the DNC’s role with the dossier and Fusion GPS.
When specifically asked, the DNC chairman declined to report how much money the DNC paid Fusion GPS, which DNC official authorized the payment or identify any DNC officials who actively collaborated with the opposition research firm.
One week after the Washington Post revealed that the Clinton presidential campaign and the DNC paid Fusion GPS, he told reporters he still had not examined how much money had been paid to the firm. “I don’t know how much of the opposition research was Fusion opposition research. I have not desegregated that amount.”
Perez also indicated that he had not ordered an internal investigation about the DNC’s role with the firm.
Whether or not he knows, he apparently doesn’t want to be seen knowing.
WHY NOT? HARRY REID SET THE PRECEDENT, AND YOU KNOW DEMS WILL DO IT THE NEXT TIME THEY’RE IN POWER: Senate Republicans threaten rules change to clear Trump nominees.
NOW THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS HOPING FOR: World’s Largest Laser Could Solve Our Energy Problems.
Almost every week brings a new campus controversy: a college speech code that goes too far, an invited speaker shouted down by students, a professor investigated for wrongthink. While lamentations abound for the state of free inquiry at American universities, few have suggested substantive proposals for redress.
Here’s a straightforward idea that would be easy to put into practice: Require schools to assure free speech and inquiry as a condition of accepting federal research funding. In addition to subsidizing tuition and providing student loans, Washington disburses billions of dollars to colleges and universities for research—nearly $38 billion in fiscal 2015 alone.
Those funds constitute about 60% of all support for university-based research, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Because universities build in usurious rates of overhead on this money—in some instances, upward of 50% goes to underwrite salaries and facilities—these are some of the most prized funds in academia. It would be easy for Washington to require schools to protect free speech before the cash can be disbursed.
Massive federal investment in higher education dates to World War II, when the U.S. purposely made universities a pillar of the nation’s approach to research and development. In a 1945 report, Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, insisted that “freedom of inquiry must be preserved under any plan for Government support of science.”
At the time this meant measures to protect university research from governmental interference. Today the threat to free inquiry on campus comes from within.
True.
POLITICS AND COMPETITION: It’s Time to Bust the Online Trusts: Anticompetitive practices by Google and Facebook made foreign election interference possible.
This week some of America’s most beloved internet companies will follow the footsteps of Big Tobacco and Wall Street in a dreaded rite of passage: the Capitol Hill perp walk. The top lawyers for Google, Facebook and Twitter will try their best to explain to the Senate Intelligence Committee how misinformation spread through their platforms in the months leading up to the 2016 election.
They are also likely to argue that the best response to their platforms’ negligence is not government regulation. If Google and Facebook are lucky, the result will be the passage of the bipartisan Honest Ads Act, which would merely require buyers of online political advertisements to reveal their identities. This is a necessary move to increase transparency, but it is not sufficient to protect the electorate from manipulation.
Focusing on the narrow question of online advertising will only distract lawmakers from the true problem: In the absence of rigorous antitrust enforcement, the consumer internet has become too concentrated in a few dominant companies, creating easy targets for bad actors.
There is a reason Congress did not have to investigate foreign meddling after the 2008 or 2012 elections. Back then the internet was still a diverse, decentralized network. Anyone could create a website or blog to satisfy the demand for popular or niche content. This older form of online community building has largely been supplanted by tools provided by the dominant players. Facebook Groups allows people to create communities without requiring much technical skill. It does, however, require a Facebook account, meaning participants have no choice but to share their identity and their data. Today, many internet services are inaccessible unless you have joined Facebook’s “community” of two billion users.
Google used to be the engine that drove the open web. In a 2004 interview, co-founder Larry Page denounced powerful intermediaries on the internet, saying that “we want you to come to Google and quickly find what you want. Then we’re happy to send you to the other sites. In fact, that’s the point. The portal strategy tries to own all of the information.”
Over time, Google’s philosophy shifted in the opposite direction, making the internet less open and pluralistic than even a few years ago.
Yep. The blogosphere of 10 years ago was much more resilient — against censorship and manipulation — than the hothouse farms of “social media” companies.
BECAUSE HE’S THE HERO WASHINGTON DESERVES, BUT NOT THE ONE IT NEEDS RIGHT NOW: Eight-foot-tall statue of Marion Berry will be unveiled March 2018 outside the John A. Wilson Building.
FOREIGN INFLUENCE: Thousands protested Trump last November in rally organized by Russia.
MARC THIESSEN: Clinton’s link to Putin is the underreported ‘dossier’ bombshell.
The news that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid for research used in the discredited Trump-Russia “dossier” is a bombshell. But even more shocking — and overlooked — is the revelation that the firm the Clinton campaign hired to compile that dossier, Fusion GPS, is the same firm that has been accused in recent congressional testimony of launching a smear campaign in Washington against Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian lawyer who was tortured and killed in a Russian prison in 2009 after uncovering a $230 million tax theft by 23 Kremlin-linked companies and individuals close to President Vladimir Putin.
Which raises the question no one seems to be asking: Why was Hillary Clinton using an opposition research company with Putin-linked clients to dig up dirt on Donald Trump?
Weird that no one is asking that.
October 31, 2017
WELL, THIS SEEMS LIKE A DIPLOMATIC SUCCESS: China says will work with South Korea towards denuclearization on Korean peninsula.
DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARKNESS: My USA Today column: Where were Hollywood and D.C. truth tellers with Harvey Weinstein and Mark Halperin? For people who keep telling us how fearlessly truthful they are, they sure have a lot of ugly “open secrets.”
WHY ARE LEFTY INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF ABUSE? NPR’s top editor placed on leave after accusations of sexual harassment.
AT AMAZON, Shop the Holiday Toy List.
THE WEEK: Mueller Is Running Amok.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Miami art professor turns American flags into KKK hoods causing outrage. “Billie Grace Lynn, a University of Miami associate professor of sculpture, calls it ‘American Mask,’ a work, she writes on her personal site, that suggests ‘bigotry and racism are hiding behind our flag.'” Well, with this project she’s right, but not in the way she thinks.
When taxpayers cut funding for higher ed, we’ll be told it’s because of “anti-intellectualism.”
WEIRD. UNDER ARMOUR SIDED WITH KNEELING ATHLETES. And now it’s stock is falling as sales tank. And Nike did the same thing (see first link) and guess what: “Under Armour is not alone. Nike Inc., the world’s largest sports brand, has also experienced lackluster growth in the U.S.”
SO IS THIS AN APPLE OR A BANANA? Actual CNN Chyron today: “WITNESSES: SUSPECT WAS YELLING ‘GOD IS GREAT’ IN ARABIC.”
And even that isn’t correct, as Robert Spencer writes: “‘Allahu akbar’ doesn’t mean what media says it means.”
MODIFIED LIMITED HANGOUT CONCLUDED. Netflix makes it official after playing fast and loose with the details yesterday: House of Cards Suspends Production on Season 6 Amid Kevin Spacey Scandal.
FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF GREAT TIMING: “It’s come to this: Activist group’s Virginia ad shows Republican trying to run down minority children,” as Allahpundit noted at Hot Air, yesterday.
The outfit responsible for this excrescence is Latino Victory, kicking in their contribution to the Democrats’ “Ed Gillespie *is* the alt-right” messaging effort in Virginia. As noted on Friday, Gillespie’s advertising lately has taken a turn towards focusing on crime, including and especially MS-13 and sanctuary cities, and the culture-war hot button of removing Confederate statues. The liberal response to that is double-pronged: (1) scream “scaremongering!” (2) scaremonger the hell out of the race themselves by comparing Gillespie repeatedly to a white nationalist tiki-torcher. (Note what’s playing on the TV at the end of this spot.) You would have thought that the rebel flag and Gillespie bumper sticker on the car would be enough to convey the message, but no, sure enough, there’s a Gadsden-flag license plate too just to make sure tea-party alumni know this is aimed at them as well. It’s a sure sign that you’re in the home stretch of a bitter race when the “my opponents are child predators” ads start running.
From that far left fever-swamp fantasy to the brutal reality of today’s events: “Eight dead in terror attack after truck careens down a cycle path near Ground Zero before the male Uzbeki driver, 29, runs off and is shot by cops while waving paintball gun and yelling Allahu Akbar,” the London Daily Mail reports, with a sidebar exploration of “How terrorists have turned to vans and lorries to murder hundreds of people in a matter of months.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5Crx_oL1Ys
Latino Victory has since pulled their ad. As Twitchy asks, “So, did they grow a conscience? Or were they just trying to bury it after today’s deadly terrorist attack in New York, where a man mowed innocent pedestrians down with a truck?”
In any case, naturally, the same media that went on a rampage over Sarah Palin’s clip art after Democrat Gabrielle Giffords, a George H.W. Bush-appointed judge, and 17 others were shot in Tucson in January of 2011 won’t lose much sleep over the horrific timing of yesterday’s ad. Just think of the media as Democratic activists with bylines and both responses make perfect sense.
UPDATE: NewsBusters notes that the ad mirrors “an actual murder [from this past June] involving a 17-year-old Muslim girl wearing a hijab who was chased down in Sterling, Virginia, by a suspect in a vehicle. According to police reports, the suspect then abducted and murdered the young girl with a baseball bat, and he is actually an illegal immigrant.”
THE “POPULATION BOMB” HYSTERIA CREATED A DISASTER, BUT NO ONE IS BEING HELD ACCOUNTABLE: The world in 2076: The population bomb has imploded. “Half the world’s nations have fertility rates below the replacement level of just over two children per woman. Countries across Europe and the Far East are teetering on a demographic cliff, with rates below 1.5. On recent trends, Germany and Italy could see their populations halve within the next 60 years. The world has hit peak child, says Hans Rosling at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. Peak person cannot be far behind.”
AT AMAZON, browse Amazon Instant Video.
Plus, deals in Game Downloads.