Archive for 2018
July 3, 2018
WELL, THEY’RE THE CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS THAT’S WHAT THEY DO: ‘BLATANT FALSEHOOD’! CAP gets BUSTED for this LIE about possible SCOTUS nominee Amy Coney Barrett. But extra points for not only misrepresenting a ruling, but misrepresenting a ruling by a panel that she wasn’t even on.
Related: MSNBC Analyst Falsely Claims Potential SCOTUS Nominee Has ‘Hate Group’ Ties. Well, it’s Zerlina Maxwell.
MORE FACEBOOK FAIL: So hiring SJW’s to filter out “hate speech” didn’t work out, but poor Zuckerberg doesn’t realize if you let the same dopes write your filtering algorithms, stupid things happen. Like banning parts of the Declaration of Independence. Reason reports that:
Since June 24, the Liberty County Vindicator of Liberty County, Texas, has been sharing daily excerpts from the declaration in the run up to July Fourth. The idea was to encourage historical literacy among the Vindicator’s readers. The first nine such posts of the project went up without incident. “But part 10,” writes Vindicator managing editor Casey Stinnett, “did not appear. Instead, The Vindicator received a notice from Facebook saying that the post ‘goes against our standards on hate speech.'”
Programmers have a saying: “Garbage In, Garbage Out.”
Related (From Ed): Facebook slammed for ‘censorship’ of country group’s patriotic song. “Facebook has been slammed by The Wes Cook Band for preventing the country group from using the social network’s paid tools to promote its song ‘I Stand for the Flag.'”
BLESS THEIR HEARTS: Mic.com Says Square Dancing is Racist.
WELL, GOOD: How a Drug For Pets May Help Prevent Zika and Malaria. “In the report, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the nonprofit drug discovery institute Calibr and TropIQ Health Sciences report that drugs called isoxazolines, which are currently sold as veterinary products like fluralaner (Bravecto) and afoxolaner (NexGard), might also work in humans to kill off pests like mosquitoes that spread diseases like Zika and malaria.”
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THIS MORNING’S WALL STREET JOURNAL WAS CORRECT: What it predicted has already come to pass. That was fast.
AYN RAND DIDN’T WRITE THE RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE AS A HOW-TO GUIDE: “Tech Elites Recreate Burning Man Inside Their Living Rooms,” and the New York Times is on it: “Like a modern version of a medieval minstrel, a singer named Jess Magic is helping A-list entrepreneurs get in touch with their inner child in private ‘songversations.’” Click over, if only for the photos, which are yet another reminder that the ‘70s is the decade that refuses to die:
“The finance and tech scene is still riding the waves of hypermasculine values,” she said. “Coffee to get through the day, alcohol to wind down, then sleeping pills at night to turn off the mind from all that they have going on.”
“People forget that they are human beings rather than human doings,” she added.
Enter the Soul Salon, which Ms. Magic calls “a play date for your inner child” and performs as a “gift,” she said (although guests are invited to “contribute in accordance with the value they feel they received”).
* * * * * * * *
Ms. Magic looked ready to jam with the “Exile on Main St.”-era Rolling Stones, wearing skintight bell bottoms and platforms, and admitted to being nervous.
“One of the reasons why I do what I do, and why I am, honestly, on this planet, is to show up with such a level of vulnerability and sincerity and authenticity, that it almost gives people permission to let it go for a little while,” she said.
Whatever the topic, Ms. Magic speaks with a faraway sense of wonder, her hazel eyes seeming to sparkle. When the singing commenced, Ms. Magic invited the assembled to sit on the floor in a semicircle, where a musician named Elijah Ray droned a mystical tune that called to mind images of saffron robes and singing bowls.
As the music swirled, Charles Eisenstein, a proponent of what he calls “sacred economics,” talked about the unending human injury to Mother Earth. “If you knew she could feel, would you stop?” he said.
Was Jerry the actor also there?
OLD AND BUSTED AT THE WASHINGTON POST: The wrong clip art can get a politician killed or injured, and thus we need a new era of civility.
The new hotness? WashPost Writer Celebrates ‘Mad Hot Summer,’ ‘Higher Dosages’ of Leftist Incivility. Dan Zak “endorsed and celebrated ‘invading spaces’ of the Trump appointees.”
That seems to be an obsession with Post columnists these days.
Tomorrow will be the one year anniversary of CNN doxxing a gif maker, because his anti-CNN animation was retweeted by Trump.
UNEXPECTEDLY! Ontario’s Minimum Wage Hike Has Been Disastrous, Especially for Disabled Workers. If only there had been some way of knowing this would happen.
DAN RATHER, NBA TRUTHER. Tin Foil Dan Rather’s Theory: LeBron Went to Lakers to ‘Resist’ Trump.
GREAT MOMENTS IN GNOSTICISM: “The NHS is our religion: it’s the only thing that saves it from the Tories,” former Social Democratic Party candidate Polly Toynbee writes in the Grauniad:
Glorious celebrations for this week’s NHS 70th birthday mark the proudest social democratic moment of our history. The Labour party descended on Tredegar, Nye Bevan’s birthplace, to march through the streets to brass bands, and London marched too. Everything lyrically expressed in Danny Boyle’s Olympic ceremony, with its 300 glowing NHS beds filled with bouncing children, is emotionally reprised in this reminder of our better selves.
Note the artwork accompanying the story, with the appearance of stained glass, with halos, doctors as the Three Wise Men,” and light streaming down from heaven onto a hospital – Nietzsche declared God dead, but he’s been revived in the form of socialized medicine. Praise be upon the glories of the NHS!
As Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.”
NO. Evangeline Lilly Wants All-Female Avengers Lineup.
I’d ask what part of “Get woke, go broke” these people don’t understand, but it’s always the second part.
JUST DON’T MENTION THE CULTURE WAR: Old and Busted: “We Are All Socialists Now,” the infamous headline on the cover of the then-Washington Post-owned Newsweek at the dawn of the Obama era in February of 2009.
The new hotness? “Speak no more of socialism,” Richard Cohen of the Post writes of the Democrats’ new “It Girl*,” the far left Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
The socialism to which Ocasio-Cortez adheres lacks the militancy of old and is supposedly attractive to young voters who have no memory of any communist association. The trouble is that young voters often don’t vote and older voters do. To the latter, the socialist label is anathema and, as far as I’m concerned, unnecessary. This, after all, is the avuncular socialism of Bernie Sanders: universal Medicare and free higher education. It needs no label. Sign me up.
The socialist label, combined with the demand to obliterate the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, is the nitro and the glycerin of a bomb that Trump can throw at the Democrats. It combines the bugaboo of socialism with the irrational fear of immigrant hordes rampaging through the countryside.
The latter fear is not to be messed with. In Germany, it may yet bring down Angela Merkel’s government and has already made doughty Denmark mad with anti-immigrant regulations that reveal a nation demented by cultural paranoia. But the United States, too, has gone through such phases, deporting “aliens” of what a 1918 law called the “anarchistic and similar classes.” They were detained first on the very Ellis Island that had welcomed some of them — and then shipped back to Europe on a tub that made steerage seem ritzy by comparison.
By the authoritarian “Progressive” superstar Woodrow Wilson, Cohen conveniently leaves out of his article.
Oh, and speaking of Ocasio-Cortez, “Valerie Jarrett Endorses Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” Steve Bartin writes at NewsAlert – using that dreaded “S”-word in his headline.
THE PHILISTINE DESTRUCTION OF JOHNNY DEPP — Rolling Stone’s hatchet job shows little understanding of what makes a great artist:
The ‘reputation takedown’ has become the default of lazy journalists and Gawker-esque, click-driven media. The fact is, there is not an artist worth his or her salt who could not be damaged by revelations about their transgressive personality and their addictions. There is something medieval about the way our society seems to take pride in destroying the achievements of era-defining geniuses, especially when it comes cloaked in judgemental gossip and public shaming.
Bill Hicks once said that anyone who has a problem with drug-taking should collect all their favourite records and burn them, as great rock ’n’ roll is the product of dangerous lifestyles. Something similar can be said of an actor like Depp. His edgy sensitiveness, his weirdo, dreamlike on-screen creations come at a cost, and that cost is a manic and unstable personality. To moralise about his failings is to show a complete ignorance of the psychological trapeze act that great artists need to perform.
Underneath the piety and condemnation of Depp is a deep, self-congratulating philistinism. How we treat our artists is a sign of our values as a culture. Given all the superciliousness contained in Depp’s Rolling Stone interview, it appears that we value virtuous posturing over the flamboyant, risk-taking genius that is necessary for great art.
It’s particularly rich considering the err…unruly life that Rolling Stone’s founder has led.
AMERICA IS GREAT AGAIN: Light beer becoming less popular as drinking habits continue to change in the U.S.
THIS UPDATE IS UNBELIEVABLE: Rosiak reports federal prosecutors have given Awan a sweetheart deal, despite the conclusions of House investigators reported in the following:
IF LUKE ROSIAK DOESN’T GET A PULITZER FOR EXPOSING HOUSE IT SCANDAL: The Daily Caller News Foundation investigative reporter has been on top of this story since February 2017 and broken virtually every incredible advance on it since then. His latest scoop is this:
A secret memo marked “URGENT” detailed how the House Democratic Caucus’s server went “missing” soon after it became evidence in a cybersecurity probe. The secret memo also said more than “40 House offices may have been victims of IT security violations.”
In the memo, Congress’s top law enforcement official, Sergeant-at-Arms Paul Irving, along with Chief Administrative Officer Phil Kiko, wrote, “We have concluded that the employees [Democratic systems administrator Imran Awan and his family] are an ongoing and serious risk to the House of Representatives, possibly threatening the integrity of our information systems and thereby members’ capacity to serve constituents.”
The memo, addressed to the Committee on House Administration (CHA) and dated Feb. 3, 2017, was recently reviewed and transcribed by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The letter bolsters TheDCNF’s previous reporting about the missing server and evidence of fraud on Capitol Hill.
Awan’s main congressional protector for years has been former Democratic National Committee Chairman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz who may well have provided a textbook illustration of how a member of Congress can use the position to obstruct justice.
But other than the fact Rosiak is virtually the only journalist pursuing what looks increasingly like a scandal of gigantic proportions, perhaps the biggest mystery is this: Where is Speaker of the House Paul Ryan?
The security and integrity of Congress have clearly been compromised but Ryan runs the other way whenever the issue comes before him.
MAGAZINE-HOARDING: Thoughts from Tamara Keel. And she’s not talking about back issues of National Geographic.
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ROGER KIMBALL: As Trump Builds, the Resistance Shouts ‘Destroy!’
That doesn’t sound like a winning message.
APPRENTICESHIPS ON THE RISE?: The rising popularity of apprenticeships usually goes under the radar. But in the last few weeks we’ve seen a poll of U.K. teens showing an increase in the popularity of the idea. And there’s bits of news from Kentucky and Chicago. And don’t forget Idaho.
But don’t start thinking the USA can replicate the German system, where more than half of young people serve at least one apprenticeship. As I wrote about in Apprenticeships: Useful Alternative, Tough to Implement, the German system depends for its success on strong national unions and complex licensing requirements. The German model would be quite unpopular here.
DEMOCRATS TOOK THE BAIT FROM DONALD TRUMP, IT’S NOT A WINNING STRATEGY AT THE POLLS, Jon Gabriel writes at USA Today:
When it comes to the midterm elections, angry protests are a political loser for Democrats. The best thing going for Democratic candidates is the enthusiasm of their voters compared with indifferent Republicans. By making GOP voters feel under siege, progressive harassers are damaging their own chances in the fall.
All of this discord plays right into Trump’s hands. He lives for insult-ridden, “us-versus-them” rhetoric. As the old saying goes, “Never wrestle with the pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”
Trump won his mud-wrestling matches with Hillary Clinton and 16 GOP also-rans. He’s eager to defend his title in November.
Before this campaign season turns into an uncivil and threatening series of tit-for-tat outrages, it’s best for all sides to pull back from the brink. As Scalise said on Twitter, “Civility and respect always prevails over harassment and disrespect.”
For all of our sakes, let’s hope he’s right.
I’m sure the left will pick up on that message as well – the moment there’s a president with (D) after his her name in the White House. In the meantime, as Steve noted earlier, EPA’s Scott Pruitt Targeted at D.C. Restaurant by Angry Woman with Toddler:
As with any competent member of #TheResistance, she promptly posted the exchange on Facebook and the post ever so handily includes information on a website set up by the Sierra Club to demand Pruitt gets the boot. Her video can be watched at the link included above… This is our new reality. An ordinary lunch with a companion can cause heartburn induced by anyone in the establishment that disagrees with the political administration in office. Pruitt does have a beefed-up security detail, thanks to all the threats he receives. This, too, is an irritation to the unhinged among us.
The amnesia that will strike the DNC-MSM the next time there is a Democratic president in office and his or her cabinet officials is forced to endure the same treatment will be astonishing to watch.