Archive for 2017
April 14, 2017
EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: “Neo-Nazis Are Tearing the Furry World Apart,” reads an actual headline that the Daily Beast actually published this week.
(Classical reference in our headline.)
THE NEW YORK TIMES FACES A DEPRESSING REALIZATION: Focused on Trump’s Successes, Many Supporters Are Unfazed by His Reversals.
CHARLIE MARTIN: How United Happens.
As Robert Conquest once said, “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.”
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: MEDIA SHOULDN’T GIVE AIR TIME TO POLITICIANS WHO WON’T ‘ACCEPT REALITY.’
Why does the veteran Clinton operative hate the boss’s wife so?
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Highbrow Fascism on Campus.
THIS REFLECTS BADLY ON THE NSA, BUT THE PUBLICATION OF THIS STUFF IS ALSO UNCONSCIONABLE: The Latest Dump of Alleged NSA Tools Is ‘The Worst Thing Since Snowden.’
In fact, the latest Shadow Brokers dump contains several working Windows zero-days in executable (.exe) binaries with “step-by-step logs laying out how they’re used and the commands to run,” according to Ashkan Soltani, an independent security researcher.
That means that pretty much anyone, from low-level cybercriminals to so-called “script kiddies”—hackers who are only good at reusing other hackers’ tools—could repurpose them to attack Windows computers.
Terrible.
QUALIFIED IMMUNITY SHOULDN’T EXIST AT ALL, SINCE IT’S A FICTION GENERATED BY JUDICIAL ACTIVISM. BUT THIS IS A GOOD CASE FOR OVERRIDING IT: NASA ‘sting’ operation against 74-year-old widow of Apollo engineer draws court rebuke.
AT AMAZON, deals in Collectible Coins.
THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Unleashing Arrogance, Complacency, and Mediocrity:
Everyone around him, including the Prime Minister (the dullest man ever to hold the position), comes off as just as uninteresting as he; though it has to be admitted that the author could make Talleyrand seem a bore. The one outstanding quality that these mediocrities seem to share is ambition. It is disconcerting for the citizen to be faced so starkly by the fact that ambitious mediocrity is now the main characteristic of those who rule him.
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The reason that these philosopher-kings didn’t object [to Brexit] beforehand was that they were confident that the vision of the anointed (to use Thomas Sowell’s pithy phrase) would triumph. So wedded to that vision is the author that he does not feel it even necessary to explain why Britain should have voted to remain in the EU. Beyond saying that serious economists, chief executives of large companies, the Governor of the Bank of England and the director of the International Monetary Fund were in favor of Britain remaining (which is, in essence, the argument from authority) he provided no arguments for his opinion—though, in fact, such arguments existed, the most convincing, at least to me, being Lord Falkland’s famous principle that when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change. Of course, when and whether change is necessary is always a matter of judgment, for no condition is perfect; but you don’t wreck a room just because there is dust on the mantelpiece.
However, the main reason the author provides no arguments for his views is that he believes that there are simply no arguments against them, and that therefore everything goes by default. Apparently, anyone who is capable of reading a book must, almost by definition, agree with Mr. Oliver. Over and over again he says that the push to exit the EU was based purely on xenophobia and propaganda lies. One does not refute xenophobia or propaganda.
Related! Hillary’s loss was “heartbreaking” for Lena Dunham, who tells the Financial Times, “There was no moment during the entirety of the Hillary Clinton campaign where Donald Trump winning the election seemed like an actual possibility to me. That could have been liberal naivety.”
As Glenn likes to say, we have the worst governing class and self-styled cultural elites on both sides of the Atlantic – and central to their worldview is Pauline Kael-ism on steroids. In January of 2013, Ace of Spades wrote a post attempting to explain the cause of the elites’ deliberate ignorance to opinions other than their own, titled “The Unburstable Bubble of Willful Ignorance of the International Self-Purported Elites.”
Brexit and Trump were a two-fisted bursting of that bubble last year – but don’t expect elites to change direction anytime soon.
Update: Hey, Kids! Let’s Take A Trip Behind The Veil of Ignorance! “Which then begs the question, which this post is preoccupied with: if the veil of ignorance is so useless (and it is), then how come so many people keep wanting to use it? Why is it that so many people find it clever?”
CONFIDENT PROPAGANDISTS LOVE TO PLAY “NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG”:
Assad’s AFP interview reprised the “nothing to see here” trope: “You have a lot of fake videos now,” (Assad) said. “We don’t know whether those dead children were killed in Khan Sheikhun. Were they dead at all?”
Assad’s “fake videos” remark intentionally mocked President Trump.
OTHER AIRLINES RESPOND TO UNITED AIRLINES’ VIOLENT AND STUPID EJECTION OF A PASSENGER: Delta will offer passengers up to $9,950 in compensation if they are willing to give up their seats on an overbooked flight.
Other airlines said they were examining their policies. American Airlines updated its rules to say that no passenger who has boarded the plane will be removed to give the seat to someone else.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Are Record Low Multistate Bar Exam Scores The Result Of Declining Law School Admissions Standards?
WHITE HOUSE TO KEEP VISITOR LOGS SECRET: What happens in the White House stays in the White House.
Not revealing the logs is more honest than scrubbing them, which was the Obama Administration’s practice, but it still doesn’t appear very swamp-drainy.
THIS IS CNN: US military defends dropping ‘mother of all bombs’ on ISIS in Afghanistan.
CNN has been running with that headline all day.
But a bunch of terrorists are dead, a weapons cache destroyed, a cave tunnel hideout made useless, no civilians killed, no American or allied casualties.
What’s there to defend? This was a textbook perfect case of Mission Accomplished.
7-11 IS GIVING AWAY A FRANCHISE, BUT ONLY WOMEN NEED APPLY.
21ST CENTURY QUESTIONS: Will Editing Your Baby’s Genes Be Mandatory?
ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Supreme Court Was “Politicized” Long Ago.
However unusual the sequence of events leading up to Gorsuch’s confirmation may seem, the reality remains that the Constitution requires presidents to obtain Senate consent before appointing a nominee—a concept dating back at least as far as Marbury v. Madison, which stated that presidential appointments “can only be performed by and with the advice and consent of the Senate.” (emphasis added).
Barack Obama was not “entitled” to fill the vacancy: he was entitled to nominate someone whom the Senate was then free to confirm or reject out of hand. Should the people who put the Senate in Republican hands after the 2014 midterms—partly, I suspect, out of concern for the ideological makeup of the Court—not have been able to enjoy the benefits of their electoral victories? Greenhouse seems to think so.
The Senate’s role is to advise and consent. Their advice to Obama on the Garland nomination was “take a flying leap, Mr. President,” which was completely within their prerogative.
IT’S AS IF NORMAL AMERICANS AND SJW-TYPES DON’T REACT TO THINGS THE SAME WAY: Survey: People Actually Like Pepsi More After Disgraced Kendall Jenner Ad.
CHANGE: How the Syria Strike Flipped the U.S.-Russia Power Dynamic.
By the time Secretary of State Rex Tillerson landed here on Tuesday night, it was Moscow that was trying to find the right response to an American president who, in 63 hours, completely inverted an isolationist message he had stuck to for nearly two years, a message his administration had been trumpeting just days prior. And by the time Tillerson wrapped up his meetings in Moscow, Trump was singing hosannas to Xi Jinping, leader of a country he had previously vowed to label a currency manipulator, while taking the stage with NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg and declaring that, suddenly, NATO was “no longer obsolete,” as Trump had maintained during the campaign.
“We have to figure out what this country’s strategy is,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on a political talk show on TVRain, an independent Russian channel, just hours after Tillerson touched down in Moscow, and hours before meetings were set to begin. “No one understands it right now. If you do, share your appraisal with us,” she said, flustered, to us journalists interviewing her.
Turnabout, and all that.
TRANSLATION? NOBODY’S BUYING: Fiat Chrysler CEO rows back on merger search, says focused on plan.
Fiat Chrysler does well enough in trucks (Ram) and SUV/crossovers (Jeep), but their car divisions are barely also-rans these days.
WELL, WELL: Judge Andrew Napolitano was apparently right about British surveillance on the American election. “He was openly mocked — and suspended from Fox News — but now, it seems, he was right.” Prediction: Trace it back, if you can, and you’ll find Obama or one of his henchmen asking the Brits to do this. Or henchwomen.
Flashback: “Hypothesis: The spying-on-Trump thing is worse than we even imagine, and once it was clear Hillary had lost and it would inevitably come out, the Trump/Russia collusion talking point was created as a distraction.”
As a commenter says to this post, about Obama: “We kept thinking he was Carter and it turned out he was Nixon.” Well, I did say that Carter was a best-case scenario.
ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What are the Best Science Fiction Shows on TV?
For my money, it was all downhill for the genre after UFO was cancelled.