BRIDGET JOHNSON: Spending Deal Stipulates Border Security Funding Can’t Build Concrete Wall. “Ryan pitches plan personally at White House to secure Trump’s support as Schumer declares ‘at the end of the day we Democrats feel very good’.”
I bet.
Archive for 2018
March 22, 2018
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Camouflaged Elites. “Even in the mostly egalitarian city-states of classical Greece, the wealthy were readily identifiable. A man of privilege was easy to spot by his remarkable possession of a horse, the fine quality of his tunic, or by his mastery of Greek syntax and vocabulary. . . . But today, the line separating the elite from the masses has blurred. First, the cultural revolution of the 1960s made it cool for everyone to dress sloppily and to talk with slang and profanity. Levis, T-shirts, and sneakers became the hip American uniform, a way of superficially equalizing the unequal. Contrived informality radiated the veneer of class solidarity. Multimillionaires like Bruce Springsteen and Bono appear indistinguishable from welders on the street. The locus classicus is perhaps Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg.”
HEALTH: Passive Detection of Atrial Fibrillation Using a Commercially Available Smartwatch. “This proof-of-concept study found that smartwatch photoplethysmography coupled with a deep neural network can passively detect AF [atrial fibrillation] but with some loss of sensitivity and specificity against a criterion-standard ECG. Further studies will help identify the optimal role for smartwatch-guided rhythm assessment.”
BEN SHAPIRO: Stop Making Children Into Moral Authorities.
On March 14, high school students from Parkland, Florida, led a school walkout in favor of gun control. The media have already appointed student witnesses of the horror at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School untouchable moral authorities; their opinions are not to be questioned.
But now, the left has found even more sympathetic faces for its agenda: kindergarteners. According to The Wall Street Journal, “Schools are grappling with how to address the event with children as young as 5 years old and with finding ways for children who are too little to be told about school shootings to take part.” Children in pre-K at Manhattan Country School will sing, “If I Had a Hammer” and “Paz y Libertad.” Public schools like PS 321 in Brooklyn allowed children to do activities linked with the protests.
There is something deeply perverse about using children to promote a political agenda.
Yes, but they don’t care.
IN THE MAIL: From Brian J. Noggle, Coffee House Memories.
Plus, fresh Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
HE’S SCARED: Zuckerberg Says He’s Open to Government Regulating Facebook. “‘I’m actually am not sure we shouldn’t be regulated,’ the Facebook CEO told CNN.”
I got to that via a WaPo piece titled “Jeffrey Toobin to his former professor Alan Dershowitz: ‘What’s happened to you?,'” which makes it seem as though Toobin got the better of Dershowitz, which is certainly not how I would score it. The clip ends with Dershowitz giving a definitive defense of himself as consistent on rule-of-law arguments: “I’m not carrying [Trump’s] water. I’m saying the exact same thing I’ve said for 50 years. And Jeffrey, you ought to know that, you were my student.The fact that it applies to Trump now rather than applying to Bill Clinton is why people like you have turned against me.”
Consistency is an obstacle to the narrative.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: OPEN SEASON ON COLLEGE PRESIDENTS AS FACULTY ‘MOBS’ WIELD POWER.
IMMIGRATION AND NULLIFICATION: John Calhoun’s California. “There is one sense in which California’s position is even more extreme than that taken by the incendiary South Carolinians of 1832. After all, the proto-confederates at least claimed, however unreasonably, that the federal law they opposed was unconstitutional. California’s politicians, in contrast, do not assert the unconstitutionality of America’s immigration laws. They just don’t want them to be enforced.”
GOOD LORD: Police shot at a man 20 times in his own yard, thinking he had a gun. It was an iPhone.
Video released by the Sacramento Police Department depicts a frantic foot pursuit through darkened streets pierced by white slivers of police flashlight.
The officers spot Clark approaching a house and shout: “Show me your hands! Stop! Stop!”
Clark is seen running, and the two officers round the corner of the house and find him under a covered patio.
An infrared camera on an overhead helicopter briefly loses sight of Clark at this moment.
“Show me your hands! Gun!” an officer shouts and ducks behind the wall in a fraction of a second.
The helicopter footage shows one of the officers appearing to grab his partner to pull him to cover.
Clark steps toward the officers. Behind the wall, one of the officers issues another command. “Show me your hands!” And then: “Gun, gun, gun!”
Both officers open fire. Sparks from the bullets light up the helicopter’s infrared camera in sharp white pops.
The sequence, from the first glimpse of Clark on the patio to the first gunshot, unfolds in about six seconds.
The officers are never heard identifying themselves as police before fatally shooting Clark.
What a mess.
nstead of nailing down every electoral vote in less-glamorous precincts, the Clinton campaign spent time raising money and running up popular vote counts in California and New York (she won the popular vote by about 3 million). The same take-it-for-granted attitude that led to her loss was on brazen display in her recent comments to an Indian audience, where she explained “I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product… I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward…. We don’t do well with married, white women…and part of that is an identification with the Republican Party, and a sort of ongoing pressure to vote the way that your husband, your boss, your son, whoever, believes you should.”
Whenever an election is unexpectedly close, there will always be weird things that crop up to “explain” the result. But just as with George W. Bush’s razor-thin victory in 2000, the real question isn’t what put the underdog over the top but how the hell the odds-on favorite managed to squander such a lead. In 2000, Bush didn’t win so much as Al Gore lost. So it is with 2016: Trump didn’t win as much as Hillary Clinton did everything possible to lose. And now we are paying for her loss by being treated to an endless procession of explanations that will take the measure of every possible reason except for her own incompetence, arrogance, and sense of entitlement.
The literal insanity coming from our alleged best-and-brightest in the wake of the 2016 election (undiminished in 2018!) is proof that our ruling class is unfit to rule.
LEAVING FACEBOOK — IT’S GONE VIRAL! Facebook Advertisers Start Pulling Out.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: McCabe, Tariffs, Omnibus Hot Mess and Much, Much More. “”Sources tell ABC News that fired deputy ‘Andy’s office’ McCabe had opened a secret investigation against Attorney General Jeff Sessions.”
RAND PAUL ON BUDGET: A ‘rotten, terrible’ way to govern. “Really, should we be looking at 1,000 page bills with 24 hours to decide what’s in them? It’s really not a good way to run your government.”
He’s right, of course.
MICHAEL BARONE: Women Against Free Speech.
Majorities of students polled said they supported both free speech and “inclusion and diversity.” When asked which was more important, 53 percent said inclusion and diversity and only 46 percent said free speech.
What I found most striking — the numbers that stood out for me — was the difference between men and women. Among men, 61 percent favored free speech. But only 35 percent of women did so. That’s a result I certainly hadn’t expected.
That number is of particular concern, because women are now a majority of college and university students. They appear to be a preponderance of the campus administrators who enforce schools’ speech and sexual assault codes, at a time when administrators outnumber teachers in higher education. . . . Female students’ willingness to subordinate free speech to political values is disturbing, in a time when habits of mind and behavior developed on campus tend to leach out to the larger society.
Defeat the matriarchy!
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Survey Says Politicized Sports, Entertainment Driving Viewers Away.
DEPLATFORMED: Reddit announces new addition to site-wide rules regarding the use of Reddit to conduct transactions.
Hello All—
We want to let you know that we have made a new addition to our content policy forbidding transactions for certain goods and services. As of today, users may not use Reddit to solicit or facilitate any transaction or gift involving certain goods and services, including:
Firearms, ammunition, or explosives.
Good catch from “Sam” on Twitter who explains that “the subreddit r/GunDeals [was] merely posts and links to gun retail websites that are fully FFL compliant.”
IT’S ALMOST AS IF ALL THE TALK OF A STEM SHORTAGE WAS INSPIRED BY THE DESIRE TO IMPORT CHEAP H1B WORKERS AND KEEP WAGES DOWN IN GENERAL: The STEM Glut.
An increasing number of insiders say, contrary to the multitude of studies and seminars we’ve slogged through, that there is not a shortage of Science Technology and Engineering Majors (STEM) but a glut. . . .
The norm now, in biomedicine and other science fields, is for newly minted PhDs to take three or more one-year stints as postdoctoral fellows in other research labs before getting a tenure-track job. Depending on the discipline and their boss, they may have a chance to pursue some independent work without the distractions of teaching and administration that beset regular faculty. But, more likely, they will serve simply as low-paid help. In large, well-funded labs dealing in hot topics, postdocs and graduate students may be little more than over-specialized technicians.
No, that couldn’t be it.
SMART MOVE: Russia reportedly helped Venezuela launch its petro cryptocurrency to skirt US sanctions.
An executive at a Russian state bank told Time that senior advisers in the Kremlin oversaw the development of the petro and that Russian president Vladimir Putin signed off on the project in 2017. “People close to Putin, they told him this is how to avoid the sanctions,” the executive told Time. “This is how the whole thing started.”
Earlier this week, the Trump administration issued an executive order prohibiting US citizens from purchasing the petro, which Maduro hopes will raise $6 billion and help shore up the country’s failing economy. Venezuela’s currency, the bolívar, has suffered from hyperinflation as a result of government mismanagement and US sanctions. The US has also frozen assets of four current and former officials of the Venezuelan government.
Cryptocurrencies could be an effective form of skirting sanctions. Time reports that Russia floated the idea of creating a digital version of the ruble, but Russia’s central bank said it would risk destabilizing the ruble itself.
“So Russia made its stronghold here in Venezuela,” Armando Armas, an opposition member of Venezuela’s parliament, the National Assembly told Time. “Now they are using Venezuela as a guinea pig for their experiment.”
All that might be true, and yet still not the whole story. If I were Putin, I’d want to help keep Maduro in power for as long as possible by almost any means available. So long as Venezuela remains socialist, the Venezuelan oil industry will continue to underperform — which means higher prices and less competition for Russian oil.
MY WEEKLY DAILY CALLER COLUMN IS UP: “Collusion, Corrections And ZOMBIE FACTS That Refuse To Die.” A look into how corrections are handled — or mishandled — and the effect it has on readers and our collective knowledge.
BILL ROGGIO: US military will not pursue Taliban into Pakistan.
“We have no authority to go into Pakistan,” Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Mike Andrews told Pajhwok Afghan News. US forces could ask for authority to chase Taliban fighters as they cross the border into Pakistan, but approval for such action “would certainly be the exception and not the norm,” he continued.
“Say, for example, we have troops in contact and then the Taliban forces go across the border,” Andrews told Pajhwok. “They are clearly inside Pakistan then. There’s no change with regards to respecting the territorial sovereignty of Pakistan.”
In the past the US military has defended its right to pursue Taliban forces retreating into Pakistan under its “inherent right of self defense.”
The US military has in rare cases pursued Taliban fighters as they crossed the border into Pakistan after battling US forces in Afghanistan. Pakistan has responded furiously to such incursions.
I wonder if there’s been a genuine policy change, or if we’re just keeping up appearances with Islamabad.