RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: 9 Pakistani Christians Dead After ISIS Bomber Hits Church During Christmas Service.
Archive for 2017
December 20, 2017
JONAH GOLDBERG: Venezuela’s a disaster. Yet socialism’s more popular than ever.
Why the disconnect? For conservatives of my ilk, the most obvious answer is that, for the left, socialism itself is never to blame. One of my favorite guilty pleasures is the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s Twitter feed, which insists daily that the socialist ideal has never been tarnished by real-world socialists. A tweet permanently affixed to the top of their page reads: “Are you about to tell us ‘Socialism was tried in Russia’ or ‘Look at Venezuela’ etc? It has NEVER EXISTED! It comes AFTER global capitalism!”
Even mainstream liberals don’t like to concede any points in socialism’s disfavor. The late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was a murderer and a tyrant, so was the late Cuban Communist Fidel Castro. Pinochet helped his country transition to democracy. Castro, who killed more people, left his country as a police state. But while Pinochet is a demonic figure in the liberal imagination, Castro’s status is far more complicated. He is still a hero to many.
For the last decade, the New York Times has covered the socialism of both Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro with the same sophisticated nuance it long applied to Cuba. Over the weekend, it ran a heart-wrenching story on how Venezuela’s poor children are dying from starvation. But the culpability of Chavism, Venezuela’s brand of socialism, is something the reader has to bring to the page. Such passive detachment between cause (in this case socialist policies) and effect (mass misery and starvation) is rarely found when the Times reports on, say, Republican economic policy.
Dedicated socialists (and their even-more enthusiastic Communist comrades) claim their political philosophy is scientific, yet those doe-eyed adherents remain permanently immune to facts and reason.
WELL, THAT’S JOURNALISM FOR YOU: Collins: Media coverage of my tax vote ‘unbelievably sexist.’
BUT I HAD BEEN ASSURED HE WAS THE NEXT HITLER: Trump’s National Security Strategy Is Shockingly Normal.
MAUREEN MULLARKEY: Why Criminalizing Sexual Harassment Fosters Witch Hunts.
What we do know is that something called sexual harassment is an imprecise but stubborn old nuisance sharpened into a crime by Catherine MacKinnon in the late ‘70s and codified by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). As first introduced, the term referred to a loose chain of workplace irritants never to be confused with sexual battery, rape, or attempted rape. By now it has expanded into an all-purpose indictment, a universal solvent for turning radical feminist choler into a blunt object.
Like that shapeless thing in the old sci-fi movie, “The Blob,” the concept of sexual harassment swallows everything it meets. It digests a degenerate thug like Harvey Weinstein together with a college student who makes an awkward pass at a girl, an office worker who tells a risqué joke, or a well-intentioned boss who compliments a woman on her dress. MacKinnon’s devouring blob is covered throughout the country by a mélange of federal, state, and city laws as a form of discrimination under human rights laws.
Delirium over harassment plays out like the courtroom scene in “Alice in Wonderland.” You remember it: The Queen of Hearts had made some tarts and someone took them quite away. Who did it? Theft is pinned on the Knave of Hearts, but evidence is a shambles, scanty at best. Accusations fly; denials tumble over each other. The king calls the jury to consider its verdict. His wife interrupts: “‘No, no!’ said the Queen. ‘Sentence first—verdict afterwards.’”
That is where we find ourselves now in the flood of unverifiable allegations hemorrhaging from college campuses and corporate offices to the Capitol. Huff and wrath arriving years, even decades, beyond their sell-by date ought to make us look closer at this inquisition.
Inquisitions are launched for the benefit of the inquisitors, not of the inquisited.
TWITTER: WHERE NOBODY AT THE COMPANY KNOWS WHAT THEY’RE DOING, OR IF THEY DO THEY LIE ABOUT IT. Internal Emails Show Twitter Struggled To Interpret Its Own Verification Rules While Hunting Trolls.. “Emails suggest that verification was never quite what Twitter said it was and that the company was aware it served as a tacit endorsement long before it admitted so publicly.”
IN THE EMAIL AND ON SALE FROM MARINA FONTAINE: Chasing Freedom.
Freedom is lost, but not forgotten.
In 2040s America, life is cheap and necessities are scarce. Yet even in the midst of drudgery and despair, unbroken spirits remain.
Julie is a young woman with a plan to ignite the spark of resistance. Randy dreams of winning Julie’s love and escaping the emptiness of over-regulated life. Joseph seeks revenge on the system for a family tragedy. Daniel is a young artist who can’t seem to stay out of trouble. Chris is an orphan prepared to do the unthinkable to protect his younger sister.
Whether by choice or by accident, each will take a path on a collision course with the oppressive regime. Will they find the freedom they desire? Or will the cost of defiance prove too high to bear?
Marina Fontaine is an immigrant from the former Soviet Union. She uses personal experience to craft a novel that takes an intimate look at life in a totalitarian society and the role that individual choices play in advancing the cause of liberty.
TO BE FAIR HARRY REID HOPES TO GET A RIDE BACK TO HIS HOME PLANET: So Apparently There Are UFOs or Whatever.
THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE: Linda Sarsour Alleged To Have Covered For Sexual Assault.
IN THE EMAIL FROM KEVIN J. ANDERSON: (And a series I’ve actually enjoyed.) Tastes Like Chicken (Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I.)
Dan Shamble, zombie P.I. faces his most fowl case yet, when a flock of murderous feral chickens terrorizes the Unnatural Quarter. Also in the caseload, Dan deals with the sinister spokesman for Monster Chow Industries, a spreading contamination that drives vampires berserk, a serial-killer demon from the Fifth Pit of Hell, a black-market blood gang led by the nefarious Ma Hemoglobin, a ghost fighting a hostile takeover of his blood bars…and a cute little vampire girl who may, or may not, be his daughter. With his ghost girlfriend Sheyenne, his bleeding-heart lawyer partner Robin, and his Best Human Friend Officer Toby McGoohan, Dan Shamble is back from the dead and back on the case. The feathers will fly as he goes face-to-beak with the evil peckers. Includes the short story Road Kill.
WHEW! THAT’LL WARM YOUR CLIMATE: Volcano may be forming under New England, scientists warn.
SOMEONE HACKED THE DNC STAFF: These are the worst passwords of 2017.
ONE MORE DAMNED THING TO SCHEDULE? This is the reason you’re still so tired all the time.
THIS EXPLAINS THE HYSTERIA OVER ITS CANCELLATION: The fall of net neutrality could ruin free porn.
WAS EVERYBODY COLLUDING WITH PUTIN EXCEPT THE DONALD? Senate probing Jill Stein for possible collusion with Russia.
TRANQUILITY BASE HERE, THE EGO HAS LANDED: Chuck Schumer Lashes Out at GOP Senators Who Were Ignoring His Tedious Floor Speech.
Bless his heart.
HOW A ERSTWHILE GROCERY MANAGER AND BIBLE SALESMAN MADE AND LOST SEVERAL FORTUNES: How P.T. Barnum pulled off one of the world’s biggest hoaxes.
December 19, 2017
AT AMAZON, big savings in Outdoor Recreation.
ANOTHER OPEN THREAD: Enjoy hanging out with other cool InstaPundit readers! (Bumped).
CONRAD BLACK: Trump’s Whirlwind Year. “Considering the sustained assault of 90 percent of the media, in which the normal honeymoon for a new president has been replaced by a daily media assassination squad, he has done well. In the post-Watergate era of the criminalization of policy differences, instead of waiting a while before firing the nuclear option as accusers had with Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton, Trump’s enemies fired this blockbuster after a few months. Undismayed, he has ripped open the facade of the Justice Department and the FBI and exposed morally corrupt hacks within, while heaping praise on the FBI rank and file. At year’s end, his enemies, battered and almost unrecognizable from reruns of their gamecock assurance of a year, let alone two years, ago, are reduced to the shabby jobbery of claiming he is about to fire the special counsel. . . . Donald Trump was a joke until nominated, unelectable until elected, incompetent until he succeeded on most fronts, and about to be impeached until he debunked the collusion nonsense; he has had a very successful year. His enemies have been weighed in the balance and they have been found wanting.”
GRAB YOUR POPCORN: Katy Tur Gets Annihilated by Dave Brat in Tax Policy Debate.
HAS NANCY PELOSI FINALLY FOUND THE DEEPEST PART OF THE DEEP END? It’s hard to imagine how the aging House Minority Leader could plunge any deeper than she did in her tirade today against the Trump/GOP tax cut. Pelosi described the measure as a “tax scam” and a “monumental, brazen theft from the American middle class and from every person who aspires to reach it.” But she was just getting started at that point, according to PolitiZette’s Kathryn Blackhurst. It got deeper and deeper and …