MY PAPER ON MILITARY COUPS JUST KEEPS GETTING MORE TIMELY: Ex-Obama Official Suggests ‘Military Coup’ Against Trump.
Here’s her original post at Foreign Policy.
I can only imagine the reaction if former Bush officials had been talking about a coup against Obama in 2009. But remember, Trump’s the crazy one. (Bumped).
HOW FASCISTS TAKE POWER: By doing what today’s “Anti-fascist” “resistance” is doing.
So, what’s the pattern? How do fascists take power? First, they are angry with election results or how the country is being run. Then fascists use militant tactics to force the population into supporting, or acquiescing in, their cause, even though most citizens don’t actually support the fascist agenda.
Today, some persons who claim to oppose fascism have started using fascist techniques, such as blockading roads and other modes of transit into the city, perpetrating violence against those who disagree with them politically, and using fear to suppress those who have different political views. But using fascist techniques is never right, and if you just removed “we will fight the fascists” from the Occupy Oakland tweet, it could be easily mistaken for a quote from Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, or Adolf Hitler.
They call themselves anti-fascist in the hopes that the gullible won’t figure out what they really are.
FLASHBACK: A Few Modest Suggestions On Amending The Constitution:
# I think the Ninth Amendment, which reads, “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people,” should be amended by adding at the end “and we really mean it!” Ditto the Tenth Amendment, which provides “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” These amendments would underscore that the federal government is one of limited and enumerated powers, and that those powers are islands in a sea of rights — rather than rights being islands in a sea of generalized federal power.
# Any person, having been elected to the office of United States senator, shall be forever ineligible to be elected to the office of president of the United States. The purpose of this amendment isn’t so much to protect the presidency, as to protect the Senate. Very few senators ever become president, but of the 100 people serving in the Senate at any given time, probably about 95 think they’ve got a shot. This causes them to treat their Senate service as a potential steppingstone, rather than an end in itself. Ban senators from higher office and you encourage them to focus on their jobs. Plus, a Senate that couldn’t serve as a steppingstone might attract a better caliber of senator…
# .Make Congress a part-time legislature. Limit it to meeting for 90 days per year, and make it illegal for members to reside in the District of Columbia the rest of the time. With members dispersed around the nation, the influence of K street will shrink — and so will members’ disconnect with the problems of regular Americans.
I liked these in 2011 and I still like them now.
REX MURPHY: THERE ARE FASCISTS ON CAMPUS. PROTESTERS DON’T REALIZE IT’S THEM, NOT MILO YIANNOPOULOS:
I suggest, as a corollary to Orwell’s prescient observation that (I’m paraphrasing) some things are so stupid that only an intellectual could believe them, that should you seek stupidity in depth and a full lock on all mental development, enroll in a prestige high-fee North American liberal university. Further, I hold that whatever debates may be underway about the targets of Orwell’s dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, the modern university is the only institution that has taken that noble work for use as a manual.
Oh, they’re not the only institution who use it as a how-to guide; the previous administration and the DNC-MSM view it that way as well, but then Obama was infinitely more suited to being the guy who hectors his fellow socialists in the faculty lounge than actually being president of the United States. And as Noah Rothman of Commentary tweeted on Friday, “Wait until everyone in Washington buying 1984 and Animal Farm find out they’re about communism.”
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DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Jonah Goldberg on “The ‘Reasonabilists’ of Berkeley:”
I hate to give any credence to this “triggering” nonsense, but every time I hear it, it sets me off like I’m Ron Burgundy and Veronica Corningstone has just said my hair looks stupid.
Even on Fox News people say it, and I’m all like “Fffft! Thiffft! [twitch] Wha-what . . . did you say?”
Do you want to know where the birthplace of the free-speech movement was? Well nobody knows for sure, but I have some guesses. It might have been ancient Athens. Or it might have been Jerusalem or Bethlehem. Or maybe it was London where, in 1689, the English Bill of Rights established a constitutional right to free speech for Parliament. Or maybe it was Philadelphia in 1776 or 1789.
I can make arguments for all of these places as birthplaces for the free-speech movement. You know where I can’t make that argument? Mother-[expletive deleted]ing Berkeley in 1964.
* * * * * * * * *
The easily triggered idiot-babies of today’s campus Left who squeal, “I don’t want to debate. I want to talk about my pain” or who insist that offensive speech is no different from a punch in the face are the direct descendants of the Free Speech Movement™ because it was Berkeley where the Feelings Supremacy Movement began and where it is clearly thriving today.
Read the whole thing.
SPEAKING OF THE LEFT AND THEIR MENTAL HEALTH, HOW ARE NEWS MAGAZINES ACCEPTING PRESIDENT TRUMP?
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Black Ivy League student claims ‘trauma’ after white professor refuses to acknowledge privilege:
A black University of Pennsylvania student recently declared that his fall semester at the Ivy League institution was “traumatic” because he had three white professors who refused to acknowledge their privilege, and one scholar in particular who “constantly perpetuated these systems of oppression … [that] led to me mentally breaking down in the classroom.”
Student James Fisher wrote about his experience earlier this month in an op-ed in the Daily Pennsylvanian campus newspaper.
In it, Fisher opens by saying: “Last semester was honestly the worst semester I’ve had at Penn so far. And all because of one thing: the white professors I’ve had at Penn. It appears that the term ‘privilege’ does not apply to them. Nor do they care to learn what it is.”
Fisher wrote about his experience with one professor, noting that there “were countless times that his lack of acknowledgment of his privilege led to some of the trauma that I experienced in class. He would show images of slaves on plantations and even allow students to say ignorant comments in class.”
“… So, because my professor wanted to protect the voices of the white students who benefit from black oppression, the oppression unfortunately continued. It even led to me mentally breaking down in the classroom,” Fisher wrote.
“And while trying to console me, [the professor] said, ‘There is no way that I could acquire the wisdom that you possess.’ That was exactly what I needed to hear! I think he thought that that was a compliment,” Fisher continued.
“I stopped going to his class for a month. With different emotions going through my head from not only this class but from the Trump election, I did not want to step foot into another white space until I made sure that my mental health was restored.”
MAKE CANADA GREAT AGAIN: Is Justin Trudeau ‘Trumpable?’, asks David Solway.
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KAROSHI: Japanese for “working to death.”
On Christmas evening, Dec. 25, 2015, newly hired Ms. Matsuri Takahashi, 24, threw herself from the top floor of the dormitory of Dentsu, Japan’s largest and most prestigious advertising firm.
Last September, the Mita Labor Standard Inspection Office announced the results of its investigation and ruled that Takahashi’s suicide was actually karoshi—death from overwork. And it was not the first time a Dentsu employee had succumbed in that way.
The incident was followed by the release of a Japanese government white paper which found that 93 people had committed suicide or attempted suicide due to overwork in 2015.
More:
Death from overwork and ceaseless overtime are closely related to the rise of what in Japan are known as burakku kigyo, loosely translated as “dark companies” or “evil corporations.” Generally the reference is to firms in which working hours are long and brutal, unpaid overtime is endemic, and harassment at work—including sexual harassment and bullying—is part of the workplace culture.
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A MAN’S GOT TO UNDERSTAND HIS LIMITATIONS: Man’s daily vodka intake calcified his pancreas.
After drinking a half a pint of vodka every day since he was 35, a 50-year-old man in Pennsylvania went to the emergency room vomiting blood. He complained of abdominal pain and “foul-smelling diarrhea” that had been plaguing him for two months, per a report on his case in the New England Journal of Medicine.
He was diagnosed with chronic pancreatitis, which is most often caused by alcoholism and means his pancreas was inflamed. In this case, a CT scan found “extensive calcification of the pancreas,” the doctors who treated him report.
I suspect he may have been drinking more than his claimed daily half-pint.
EVERYTHING TRUMP IS DOING ESTABLISHMENT DEMOCRATS SET IN MOTION:
On January 27, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer called Trump’s plan to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, “divisive and unnecessary.” But in 2006 Obama, Clinton, Biden, Schumer and 20 other Democrats in the Senate at the time voted in favor of the Secure Fence Act, which called for a physical barrier to be built along the U.S.-Mexico border. Bernie Sanders, who was a Representative in the House at the time, voted against the bill. The fence was never completed due to Congress failing to provide the necessary funding. President Trump’s recent executive order to build a physical wall along the U.S.-Mexico border cites that the order falls under the 2006 Secure Fence Act that Bush signed into law.
Ouch.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Do The Shortest Workout Possible. “Athletes have long used interval sessions as part of a varied weekly training program to improve their competitiveness. But Dr. Gibala, a professor of kinesiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, has helped to popularize the idea that we can rely on high-intensity intervals as our only exercise, and do very, very few of them while still improving our health and fitness.”
SO MUCH WINNING, YOU’LL BE SICK OF ALL THE WINNING. Report card: Conservatives just had their best fortnight in a decade.
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Death rates for many US 30-year-olds are rising in an ‘extremely unusual’ way.
OR WAS THE SERVICE JUST LOUSY? Restaurant Fires Rhode Island Legislator for Political Talk.
Classic Cafe owner Raymond Burns said Thursday he warned Providence Democratic Rep. Moira Walsh that her “vocal political discussions” during her shift were interfering with her work. He said the final straw was a scathing online review of the restaurant that complained about Walsh.
Walsh denied that she had been warned against talking politics with customers and said the negative review complained about her political beliefs, not her service. The review discouraged men from patronizing the Providence breakfast spot because of what it described as “anti-male” views she had expressed on the radio and on social media.
Walsh said she got the job as a teenager and worked there for eight years before her firing last week.
“His direct quote to me was, ‘You know, we’re very proud of everything that you’re doing up at the State House, but your political views are affecting the business and we have to terminate your employment,'” she told WPRO-AM on Thursday.
In my experience, political talk and the service industry are usually a bad mix.
NY FASHION DESIGNER DEBUTS ANTI-TRUMP, PRO-MILITANT MENSWEAR LINE: “Designer Robert James debuted a collection that was unmistakably, ‘decidedly militant in tone’ in order to ‘create clothes that felt like armor.’ The look screams ‘Occupy radical chic.’”
Allahpundit wrote earlier this week that “American politics increasingly feels like a novel whose events are retold by two unreliable narrators, Trump being one and the media being the other.” My take? Forget being trapped the Matrix – at the end of election night in November, all of America went to sleep and found itself the next day trapped in the first draft of Tom Wolfe’s next novel.
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