Archive for 2017
October 14, 2017
AS KURT SCHLICHTER SAYS, THEY’RE GOING TO HATE THE NEW RULES: George Lopez booed off stage after Trump jokes flop at gala.
UPDATE: From the comments: “It’s like these guys are falling over themselves to help get Trump re-elected.”
COMRADE, IT IS TIME TO UPDATE YOUR NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY ONCE AGAIN. AP Lingo Police: Use ‘Gender Confirmation’ Surgery for Transgenders.
NO WONDER DEMOCRATS ARE SO UPSET: Behind Trump’s latest moves: A return to constitutional government.
Obama kept the Affordable Care Act looking healthy via an extra-constitutional grant of $1 trillion to health-insurance companies. That required congressional approval, and Obama’s decision to bypass Congress was held unconstitutional by a federal court. President Trump’s decision Thursday to halt the bailout makes the litigation moot and represents a return to constitutional government.
The same can be said of Trump’s Friday decision to throw the Iran deal back to Congress, by refusing to certify that Iran is in compliance with the deal.
Recall that this was a treaty that should never have been adopted without two-thirds approval in the Senate, as required by the Constitution. That didn’t happen — because a compliant Republican Congress passed the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, which provided that the president certify to Congress every 90 days that the suspension of sanctions against the regime is “appropriate and proportionate” with respect to its illicit nuclear program.
And that’s what Trump didn’t do. He didn’t tear up the treaty, or even decertify anything. Rather, he failed to certify, and simply told the truth. Iran isn’t permitting the nuclear inspections the treaty contemplates, and the Revolutionary Guard, which controls much of the government, is a terrorist organization.
The regime is building missiles that threaten us and our allies, and its infractions don’t justify our continued suspension of sanctions.
Now it’s Congress that has to act. Or dodge its duty, as it did when it passed INARA in 2015.
No wonder Republicans are so upset.
SUZANNE VENKER: Are you weak if you make your man a sandwich? This is why real men don’t marry feminists. “The feminist worldview is antithetical to love because its focus is solely on women: their needs, their wants, their desires, and their rights. Love can’t possibly be sustained with an attitude like that.”
NOT A GOOD LOOK FOR HER: Chelsea Clinton runs from questions about handing back Harvey Weinstein’s tainted $250,000 donations — and her father deploys security to keep the Press away.
Weinstein reportedly donated a total of $1,492,673.45 to Hillary over the last two decades.
Besides also taking his money, has anyone asked Barack or Michele what on earth they were thinking letting their daughter intern for him earlier this year? Did anyone warn them of his lecherous nature? As far left New York magazine journalist/Veep producer Frank Rich tweeted last week, “Biggest mystery of @nytimes Weinstein story: How exemplary parents like Obamas let their daughter work there. The stories were out there.”
THIS SHOULD SURPRISE PRECISELY NO ONE: A Condom-Maker’s Discovery: Size Matters. “Men have long complained about how condoms fit. Now a manufacturer is selling condoms in 60 sizes, in combinations of 10 lengths and nine circumferences.”
STAY TUNED: Anti-‘Immigrant’ Parties Likely to Win Tomorrow in Austria. “Meanwhile, in Germany, they’re just saying no to Islamic ‘holidays.'”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Tourniquets, once out of favor, helped save lives in Vegas shootings.
THEIR TEARS ARE LIKE FINE WINE: ‘New York Times’ Despairs of Iowa’s Turn to the Right. “The explanation, according to the Times, is that Iowa simply isn’t retaining enough of its college graduates. The state’s industrial base has cratered, forcing the smart kids to seek their fortunes elsewhere, and leaving the dumb ones without degrees at home to vote Republican. No — seriously.”
Their egos are too fragile to withstand the self-examination necessary to arrive at the correct answer.
NASTY, BRUTISH, AND FAT: John Podhoretz on Hobbes and Harvey Weinstein.
Harvey Weinstein is an exceptionally clever man who spent decades standing above and outside the system, manipulating it and gaming it for his own ends. He’s no cog. Tina Brown once ran Weinstein’s magazine and book-publishing line. She wrote that “strange contracts pre-dating us would suddenly surface, book deals with no deadline attached authored by attractive or nearly famous women, one I recall was by the stewardess on a private plane.” Which means he didn’t get into book publishing, or magazine publishing, to oversee the production of books and articles. He did it because he needed entities through which he would pass through payoffs both to women he had harassed and molested and to journalists whose silence he bought through options and advances. His primary interest wasn’t in the creation of culture. It was the creation of conditions under which he could hunt.
Which may explain his choice of the entertainment industry in the first place. In how many industries is there a specific term for demanding sexual favors in exchange for employment? There’s a “casting couch”; there’s no “insurance-adjustor couch.” In how many industries do people conduct meetings in hotel rooms at off hours anyway? And in how many industries could that meeting in a hotel room end up with the dominant player telling a young woman she should feel comfortable getting naked in front of him because the job for which she is applying will require her to get naked in front of millions?
And then there’s the nihilism and moral inversions that run rampant in so many of his movies.
His 2002 biopic of Frida Kahlo starred Salma Hayek as the unibrowed unrepentant communist who covered all the bases – she had an affair with Trotsky, but one of her final paintings was titled “Self Portrait with Stalin.” As Nick Gillespie wrote at Reason last year, “That is some fucked-up art right there. Uncle Joe had died the year before and only the most deluded bitter-clingers were under any illusions about his reign of terror.”
2008’s The Reader is based on a bestselling, Oprah-approved German novel that attempts to wipe away German guilt for the Holocaust. It starred Kate Winslet as a sexy slimline version of Sgt. Schultz, who knew nothing – nothing! – while serving as a guard at a concentration camp, because she was illiterate (and apparently deaf as well). Regarding an earlier Weinstein WWII movie, as John Nolte wrote in 2010 at Big Hollywood, “For those of you who haven’t seen ‘The English Patient,’ just imagine what Satan would’ve done with ‘Casablanca:’”
This film’s appalling philosophy all comes together in the final act after Laszlo and Katharine’s wicked ways come home to roost and they find themselves stranded deep in the desert. He can walk the three days out but her ankle is broken. Having to leave her behind with only a few days’ supply of water and food, her mortality clock is ticking and after a series of complications back in civilization, our “hero” deliberately sells out the British — the West — to the Germans in order to secure the plane necessary to save Katharine. He gives the Nazis (the Nazis!) crucial maps. Afterwards, when he’s informed that this act likely caused the death of thousands of Allied soldiers and civilians, Laszlo’s reply is like something you would normally hear from a James Bond villain…
“Thousands of people die. They were just different people.”
….except that rather than be chilled and repulsed by this response, we’re supposed to put finger to chin and bask in the poetic profundity of it all.
His whole review is well worth your time to get a sense of the film’s nihilism and heads-is-tails morality. And then there’s pretty much the entire Tarantino oeuvre, which Weinstein produced, not least of which Pulp Fiction. While it’s admittedly loads of fun, the N-word is uttered endlessly throughout the film, including by Tarantino’s character himself — simply because the filmmakers could. (Incidentally, Tarantino now claims he knew nothing — nothing! — about Weinstein’s exploits during his 25 year career under his aegis.)
Exit quote from Podhoretz’s article:
“You know what? It’s good that I’m the fucking sheriff of this fucking lawless piece-of-shit town.” Weinstein said that to Andrew Goldman, then a reporter for the New York Observer, when he took him out of a party in a headlock last November after there was a tussle for Goldman’s tape recorder and someone got knocked in the head.
Sadly, he was a law unto himself in Hollywood as well. Weinstein of course didn’t bring what Paul Johnson dubbed moral relativism to Hollywood. The 20 year gulf between the 1948 Alfred Hitchcock film Rope, a post-WWII attack on the Nietzschean uberman, to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which yearns for his arrival, illustrates how radically the industry’s moral underpinnings had shifted in the postwar era, a collapse accelerated by the scrapping of the Hays Code. But by the 1990s, Hollywood product meant two things: mindless “blowed up real good” CGI summer action movies and the Oscar-bait Weinstein specialized in. The latter are beautifully photographed movies cast with beautiful women — who no doubt did, witnessed, or at the very least heard stories of unspeakable things with Harvey to land their roles. And in many cases, these films are a clear insight into Harvey’s abhorrent worldview. He was the sheriff of that lawless town indeed.
UPDATE: “Harvey Weinstein has been expelled by the Academy of Motion Picture, Arts and Science in an unprecedented condemnation of decades of sexual harassment.”
As Stephen Miller sardonically tweets, “That’ll fix everything.”
UMM, ISN’T THAT ITS GOAL? Mississippi School district pulls To Kill A Mockingbird from reading list; ‘makes people uncomfortable.’
Related Insta-flashback to 2014: ASHE SCHOW: Atticus Finch: American literature’s most celebrated rape apologist. “If ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ were taught in women’s studies classes today, Finch would have to be labeled the villain of the book for not accepting at face value an accuser’s tale of rape and for posing difficult, painful questions to her on the witness stand.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why Adding Fat To Your Food Can Actually Make It Better For You.
HMM: Low Serum Calcium Linked to Sudden Cardiac Arrest Risk.
Lower serum calcium levels, even within the normal range, may increase risk for sudden cardiac arrest, new research suggests[1].
After examining laboratory test results taken within 90 days prior to a sudden cardiac arrest (SCA), researchers found cases had lower corrected calcium levels than matched controls, 80% of whom had a diagnosis of CAD (9.18 mg/dL vs 9.27 mg/dL, P=0.03).
In multivariable analysis, a 1-unit decrease in calcium levels was associated with a 1.6-fold increase in SCA risk (odds ratio [OR] 1.63, 95% CI 1.06–2.51), according to the study, published October 5, 2017 in Mayo Clinical Proceedings.
I await further studies.
I SUSPECT A LOT OF THIS SOFTWARE COULD BE REPURPOSED FOR SEXBOTS: Robotic masseuse treating patients in Singapore: Emma measures muscle and tendon stiffness, calculating the optimal massage a patient requires, developers say.
HE CHOSE…POORLY: NFL Commissioner Caves to Players, Will Not Require Standing for Anthem.
THE THIRD-WORLDING OF CALIFORNIA: California declares state of emergency over deadly hepatitis A outbreak. “California’s outbreak, however, is spreading from person to person, mostly among the homeless community. Unsanitary conditions make the virus more likely to infect more people because it’s also transmitted through contact with feces.”
Flashback: “Last week, ironic juxtaposition came to San Diego. University of San Diego Law Dean Stephen Ferruolo issued a statement critical of one of his faculty, Larry Alexander, who had committed the sin of coauthoring an oped with Amy Wax of Penn Law School. The two professors praised the ‘bourgeois virtues.’ Also in San Diego that week, crews began hosing things down with bleach solution in an effort to halt a hepatitis A outbreak spread by people pooping in the street.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Here’s the Awful 146-Word “Essay” That Earned an A- for a UNC Jock.
But now, according to the NCAA, that’s great. NCAA’s ‘student-athlete’ hypocrisy comes full circle with North Carolina verdict: What’s the value of an education if you allow for academic fraud?
As always, IowaHawk nails it:
IN THE MAIL: From Paul Dufffau, Got To Be A Hero (The Accidental Hero) (Volume 1).
Plus, fresh Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
KIMBERLY STRASSEL: Scalias All the Way Down: While the press goes wild over tweets, Trump is remaking the federal judiciary.
The media remains so caught up with the president’s tweets that it has missed Mr. Trump’s project to transform the rest of the federal judiciary. The president is stocking the courts with a class of brilliant young textualists bearing little relation to even their Reagan or Bush predecessors. Mr. Trump’s nastygrams to Bob Corker will be a distant memory next week. Notre Dame law professor Amy Coney Barrett’s influence on the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals could still be going strong 40 years from now.
Mr. Trump has now nominated nearly 60 judges, filling more vacancies than Barack Obama did in his entire first year. There are another 160 court openings, allowing Mr. Trump to flip or further consolidate conservative majorities on the circuit courts that have the final say on 99% of federal legal disputes.
This project is the work of Mr. Trump, White House Counsel Don McGahn and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Every new president cares about the judiciary, but no administration in memory has approached appointments with more purpose than this team.
Mr. Trump makes the decisions, though he’s taking cues from Mr. McGahn and his team. The Bushies preferred a committee approach: Dozens of advisers hunted for the least controversial nominee with the smallest paper trail. That helped get picks past a Senate filibuster, but it led to bland choices, or to ideological surprises like retired Justice David Souter.
Harry Reid’s 2013 decision to blow up the filibuster for judicial nominees has freed the Trump White House from having to worry about a Democratic veto during confirmation. Mr. McGahn’s team (loaded with former Clarence Thomas clerks) has carte blanche to work with outside groups like the Federalist Society to tap the most conservative judges.
Mr. McGahn has long been obsessed with constitutional law and the risks of an all-powerful administrative state. His crew isn’t subjecting candidates to 1980s-style litmus tests on issues like abortion. Instead the focus is on promoting jurists who understand the unique challenges of our big-government times. Can the prospective nominee read a statute? Does he or she defer to the government’s view of its own authority? The result has been a band of young rock stars and Scalia-style textualists like Ms. Barrett, Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett and Minnesota Supreme Court Associate Justice David Stras.
And so far, the Senate has kept it together.
STEPHEN KRUISER: Twitter Founder Announces Strict New Thought Police Rule.
STILL ALIVE AND WELL: Voice of America shows the world that the American Dream combined with common sense values and hard work can still be the envy of the world. Immigrant puts his shoulder to the wheel, works two jobs — one as a dishwasher at the Hilton Hotel, earning $5.65 an hour –and earns his way up to owning a successful transportation company. The kicker says it all:
“When a person is free, you can do anything,” he said. “So appreciate what you have, work so very hard, and get rid of the wrong pride we have back home that if you have a college degree you have to be in a professional line [of work] and you can’t dig the potatoes or do the dishes. Work is work and go out there and do what is available. Be proud of it.”
Try that in France or Spain. Not. Going. To. Happen.