THEY STILL CAN’T HEAR US NOW: GamerGate – the canary in the coal mine.
Archive for 2017
January 29, 2017
January 28, 2017
FROM A FORMER COLLEAGUE, some nice memories of my Dad.
AT AMAZON, New and Interesting Finds, Updated Daily.
Plus, Coupon Deals Galore.
THE FORGOTTEN HOLOCAUST: THE FILMS OF BORIS MAFTSIR:
“By the end of 1941,” writes Timothy Snyder in Holocaust: The Ignored Reality, “the Germans (along with local auxiliaries and Romanian troops) had killed a million Jews in the Soviet Union and the Baltics. That is the equivalent of the total number of Jews killed at Auschwitz during the entire war. By the end of 1942, the Germans (again, with a great deal of local assistance) had shot another 700,000 Jews, and the Soviet Jewish populations under their control had ceased to exist. … By 1943 and 1944, when most of the killing of West European Jews took place, the Holocaust was in considerable measure complete.”
* * * * * *
Maftsir doesn’t mince words when he talks about the near-erasure of the eastern half of the Holocaust. “The place of memory of the Holocaust is already taken up,” he says. “There is the Victim—Anne Frank. There is the Saint—Janusz Korczak. There is the Villain—Adolf Eichman. There is Hell, it’s Auschwitz. There is heroism—the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And that’s it.”
Read the whole thing.
(Via Maggie’s Farm.)
OBAMA DID A 6-MONTH IMMIGRATION PAUSE ON IRAQ, NOBODY CARED. TRUMP DOES A 3-MONTH PAUSE ON A LIST OF COUNTRIES THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION PUT TOGETHER AND HE’S LITERALLY HITLER. The Green Card thing is genuinely horrible, but that’s not even what people are going apeshit about.
And Trump’s fine with that, because it will play badly, and he knows it.
Tom Nichols is as big a NeverTrumper as there is, but he understands the strategy. And even he’s getting impatient with the opposition.
Do you want more Trump? Because explosive anger mixed with sanctimony is how you get more Trump.
THE SHOCKING NEWS ABOUT PRESIDENT TRUMP: He means it. “The President of the United States of America Donald Trump says he will use the power of his office to tear up the post-WWII international and domestic settlements.”
The Obama presidency was when it became clear that the post World War Two arrangements weren’t working anymore. The Trump presidency will feature the renegotiation, or abandonment, of those arrangements. Yet relatively few people have figured that out.
YOU WANT MORE TRUMP? BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET MORE TRUMP. 2016: The Year The Campus Culture Wars Jumped The Shark. Judging by the apparently complete lack of awareness of this fact on the part of university folks, I predict that 2017 will be worse. And Donald Trump smiles.
SO WHEN DOES HE TELL KRUGMAN AND THE REST OF HIS EMPLOYEES AT THE NEW YORK TIMES TO DIAL IT BACK A NOTCH OR TEN? Carlos Slim: Mexico shouldn’t fear ‘great negotiator’ Trump.
THERE’S THAT WORD AGAIN: Investor’s Business Daily: Obama’s Legacy — 8 Years of an Unexpectedly Weak Economy.
The latest numbers mean that Obama’s economic forecasters missed their growth targets every year that he was in office. And, once again, economists who had been promising that strong growth was just around the corner — most recently because of a relatively strong third quarter — had to eat crow.
It also means that GDP growth has not exceeded 3% for 11 straight years. . . .
In dollar terms, if Obama’s recovery had merely been average, the nation’s GDP would be $2.4 trillion bigger. That translates into $19,000 in lost income per household.
Heck, if Obama’s recovery had managed only to live up to the forecasts Obama himself made at the start of each year — which always turned out to be too optimistic — GDP would be nearly $1 trillion bigger today.
Obama’s record on jobs tells the same story. On average, the number of jobs was 18% higher 7-1/2 years after those recoveries started. Under Obama, it was 10.9%. That translates into 12 million fewer jobs.
If you want to know why Donald Trump is sitting in the Oval Office instead of Hillary Clinton, here are your reasons.
In our view, the incredibly mediocre economy we’ve suffered with over the past 7-1/2 years is not the result of some mysterious underlying “secular” shift that makes it impossible to grow faster than 2.6%. It is the result of bad economic policies, most of which were enacted by Obama in his first two years in office when Democrats controlled Congress.
The good news for Trump is that the bar is set pretty low.
WHY ARE BLUE STATES SO SEX-OFFENDER-FRIENDLY? Boston sex offenders too easy to lose. Of course, the “punishment” is . . . more money! “The Boston Police Department is set to receive a $130,000 Department of Justice grant to pay for overtime for cops to track sex offenders.”
To be fair, a lot of registered “sex offenders” are guilty of trivial offenses like having sex in public or peeing by the side of the road, things that don’t make them a threat. But clogging the list up with them makes it harder to keep track of the real predators.
WELL, THIS IS STUPID: DHS Spox: Trump Muslim Ban Includes Green Card Holders. It’s fine to be more careful about admitting people from countries that are major terror exporters, but Green Card holders are permanent legal residents — they’re not “admitted,” they’re returning home. If there’s a problem with green card grants to people from those countries, it needs to be addressed systematically, not simply by stopping people at the border. This is a debacle, and I’d be very interested in knowing who actually drafted the order.
UPDATE: Obama’s administration made the “Muslim ban” possible and the media won’t tell you. “Where is the ‘Muslim ban?’ It turns out this was a form of fake news, or alternative facts. Trump didn’t select seven ‘Muslim-majority’ countries. US President Barack Obama’s administration selected these seven Muslim-majority countries. The Department of Homeland Security targeted these seven countries over the last years as countries of concern. . . . What? So there was a Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of 2015 two years before Trump? There was a kind of ‘Muslim ban’ before the Muslim ban? But almost no one critiqued it in 2015 because it was Obama’s administration overseeing it.”
Related: The Obama Administration Stopped Processing Iraq Refugee Requests For 6 Months In 2011. Yes, but when Obama does it, it’s humane.
SEMI-AUTONOMOUS ISN’T AUTONOMOUS ENOUGH: Study shows humans slow to take over when cars call for help.
ROMANCE IS IN THE AIR: Shop Amazon – Valentine’s Day.
Plus, New Year New You: Deals in Fitness, Nutrition, and More.
LYSERGIC BLISS: LSD May Help Reveal What Makes Music Meaningful.
In the study, researchers asked people to take the drug lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, and then were able to pinpoint how people’s brains ascribed meaning to specific factors, such as songs, in their environment.
It turns out that this connection to meaning may involve certain areas of the brain that previous research has tied to how people experience their sense of self, the researchers said.
The new findings show which cells, chemicals and regions in the brain “are involved when we perceive our environment as meaningful and relevant,” study co-author Katrin Preller, a psychology and neuroscience researcher at the Zürich University Hospital for Psychiatry in Switzerland, said in a statement.
“This is important to understand, since it can reveal potential targets for the treatment of psychiatric illnesses,” Preller told Live Science.
Certain people (such as our esteemed host, Glenn) can enjoy musical synesthesia without the help of hallucinogens — and they’re often found working in the music industry. It may well prove that their unusual talent is tied into their sense of well-being, which would make music a perfectly tuned pursuit.
FASTER, PLEASE: 3-D-Printed Skin Leads the Way Toward Artificial Organs.
SEE, BARACK OBAMA ONLY TALKED THIS WAY TO HIS DOMESTIC POLITICAL ENEMIES: Nikki Haley to UN: ‘We’re taking names.’
LAYERS AND LAYERS OF FACT-CHECKERS AND EDITORS: “Other than San Bernardino shootings, has there been a terrorist attack involving a non-US-born attacker since 9/11?,” New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman cluelessly tweets. Twitter responds, but likely to no avail.
NEW CIVILITY WATCH: Joss Whedon Calls Ivanka Trump a Dog, Jared Kushner ‘Voldemort in Training.’
You stay classy, Hollywood.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy.
RIGHT ON CUE: After years of liberal hate, George W. Bush is getting the respect he deserves:
It was in February 2010, on Interstate 35 in Wyoming, Minn., according to Wikipedia, that the billboards first began to appear: “MISS ME YET?” ran the message over a picture of George W. Bush.
“Kind of,” say today’s Democrats.
With Obama out and Trump in, the mental malady known as Bush Derangement Syndrome has finally begun to recede, and the 43rd president is enjoying an unlikely renaissance. Progressive journalist David Corn approvingly quoted Bush on Inauguration Day. Time magazine, Slate The Atlantic and the op-ed page of The New York Times have all run pieces in which left-wing writers favorably compared the second President Bush’s rhetoric to President Trump’s.
Then, last weekend on “Saturday Night Live,” host Aziz Ansari praised Dubya in his monologue, noting that “George W Bush made a speech after 9/11, and it really helped.
But this is the pattern for the left for every Republican president once he’s out of office (or in Barry Goldwater and Mitt Romney’s case, having been successfully vanquished), from Eisenhower on, including Nixon. Each Republican president is demonized while in office, and then, right on cue, held up as an example of eloquence, seriousness, and/or foreign policy brilliance in order to bash the current Republican in the Oval Office. But at this point, the Democrat’s playbook is stuck in the leather helmet days of the NFL: Large swatches of the American public have to be asking themselves: Since none of the former GOP presidents you said were Hitler while they were in office turned out to actually be Hitler, then the guy you’re currently saying is Hitler isn’t Hitler, either.