ARE YOU A SERF OR A CITIZEN: Sarah Hoyt asks How Long Will You Tolerate Having Your Franchise Deprecated and Nullified?
Archive for 2018
August 9, 2018
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY MAOISM: Among all the complaints about the administration’s China trade policy, it’s often overlooked that Xi is no Deng, and is happy to warp international trade for domestic purposes. AEI’s Derek Scissors looks at the implications:
Xi will be in power indefinitely, leaving little hope for genuine change and leading to broader American antagonism as his personal dictatorship persists.
American policymakers demanding the PRC abandon much of its industrial policy can seem naïve. It’s more likely they have come to accept a painful trade conflict because they don’t believe China is truly willing to become a good partner. After 25 years of enormous expansion, the US-PRC economic relationship is going to shrink, sooner or later.
More on this from Derek here.
IF HE WERE A REPUBLICAN THIS WOULD BE A MUCH BIGGER STORY: Democrat drives to friend’s home and reportedly shoots him over political disagreement on Facebook.
I THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: “Definitive evidence that cockroaches are vectors for human disease is still lacking.”
JUST ANOTHER NIGHT IN GAZA: More than 150 rockets were launched from the Gaza Strip overnight, and Israel retaliated with deadly airstrikes.
I’m old enough to remember when returning Gaza to the Palestinians would bring peace to the Strip.
HOW POWERFUL IS GOOGLE? Powerful enough to rename your part of town.
HEADLINES FROM… PICK A YEAR, ALMOST ANY YEAR: Get Ready for a Massive Government Spending Spree.
Without a budget agreement in place, agencies spent cautiously through the first two quarters of fiscal 2018 before the omnibus—signed six months late in March—obligated an additional $80 billion for defense and $63 billion for civilian agencies.
Federal agencies, now flush with cash, must obligate that money before the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30 or lose it to the Treasury Department. Analysts believe the federal market will see a monumental effort among procurement officials to spend as much on contracts as possible.
“If agencies are going to spend the extra money in fiscal 2018, it’s going to have to be at a much higher percentage in the fourth quarter than it has been historically,” David Berteau, president of the Professional Services Council, told Nextgov.
Those record-breaking peacetime deficits aren’t going to spend themselves, you know.
FASTER, PLEASE: New treatment for non-Hodgkin lymphoma approved.
NO. NEXT QUESTION? Is Russia’s Military Better Than America’s?
On the other hand, Russia’s political leadership usually shows more resolve and consistency on military affairs.
100 SKILLS EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW.
SPENGLER: Pope Francis Is Woefully Wrong about the Death Penalty.
The ancient rabbinic view is close to that of St. John Paul II in the 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae. He argued that the death penalty should be “very rare and practically non-existent.” But there is a great gulf fixed between “very rare and practically non-existent,” and the complete abolition of the death penalty, as Pope Francis now teaches. The abolition of the death penalty in principle would in my view weaken the foundation of all states, and most emphatically that of the best of states. It would do irreparable harm to the legitimacy of modern states, an elusive issue that is set in clear relief by the issue of the death penalty.
Consider an extreme example. The State of Israel has executed just one criminal since its founding in 1948, namely Adolf Eichmann, whose crimes surpass the human capacity to absorb horror and whose life was an affront to God as well as man. Israel now confines in prison Arab terrorists who willfully murdered young children and old people, but has never executed any of them; whether it should have done so may be debated, but the fact is that Eichmann’s crimes are of an entirely different order than that of a mere bus-bomber or child rapist.
For Israel, Eichmann had to be executed as a matter of raison d’etat. The nation-state of the Jewish people cannot fulfill its purpose if it is unable to rid the world of a monster who organized the systematic murder of millions of Jews.
Read the whole thing.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EDITORIALIZES: The ‘Red Wave’ Illusion: Evidence builds of major GOP losses in November.
Republicans on present trend are poised in November to lose their majority in the House of Representatives and a slew of governorships. That’s the clear message from Tuesday’s election contests and a growing body of evidence. The President’s persona is trumping positive policy results among voters, and without some intervening news or a change in strategy the result is likely to be a national left turn.
Republicans appear to have won a narrow victory in the special House election in Ohio, with provisional and absentee ballots still to be counted. But a win of less than 1% in a heavily Republican district is hardly a show of strength. The Democratic share of the two-party vote surged as it has in every special election this year, while GOP State Senator Troy Balderson was crushed in Franklin County around Columbus by 2 to 1.
The ominous news for Republicans is that they hold about 68 House seats that are less Republican than this Ohio district.
On the other hand: Democrats lead in generic ballot is shrinking. Down to five points this morning – last four polls (three weekly trackers) in a row show it even tighter. IBD/TIPP has a tie.
But nobody knows anything. If you care, the best thing to do is get involved in a swing-state or swing-district race, whether or not it’s where you live.
UPDATE: “Absolutely” a blue Muslim wave coming, says Michigan congressional candidate Rashida Tlaib.
SPACE FORCE UPDATE: Pence unveils plan to create Space Force by 2020.
Some of my friends on Facebook are wondering why Pence is the one making this announcement. It’s because the Vice President heads the Space Council, which is a tradition going back to when LBJ was veep. (Though we haven’t always had a Space Council, since it was abolished and then reinstated a couple of times).
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Sarah Jeong Is a Boring, Typical Product of the American Academy. “The key features of Jeong’s worldview are an obsession with whiteness and its alleged sins; a commitment to the claim that we live in a rape culture; and a sneering contempt for objectivity and truth-seeking. These are central tenets of academic victimology. From the moment freshmen arrive on a college campus, they are inundated by the message that they are either the bearers of white privilege or its victims. College presidents and the metastasizing diversity bureaucracy teach students to see racism where none exists, preposterously accusing their own institutions of systemic bias. ‘Bias response teams,’ confidential ‘discrimination hotlines,’ and implicit-bias training for faculty and staff roll forth from university coffers in wild abandon.”
Welcome to the academy’s New Normal.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): When taxpayers get tired of subsidizing those university coffers, we’ll be told it’s because of “anti-intellectualism.”
TRUE: Jon Gabriel: We’re overusing the word ‘extremism’ – and people are getting hurt. Well, for certain values of “we.”
THE INTERNET SALES TAX PAPERWORK AVALANCHE: “It’s killing my business,” says the owner of Barcoding, Inc. (probably a paywall there). Congress has to act. No, really. Stop laughing.
INTERNET DATING AND POLICING TINDER LIES.
IN THE MAIL: From Dinesh D’Souza, Death of a Nation: Plantation Politics and the Making of the Democratic Party.
